It had been permanently SKIPPED because it expected bootstrap/standup.sh, which never landed on main — planned, never merged, still living only on the unmerged prod-standup branches along with the 2026-09-05 incident it came from. Dropping the real script in and running the old check produced FAIL 2/34: it would have false-blocked the very merge that landed its own input. Now split into the half that needs no guard (no overlay ships a placeholder-shaped effective cluster-vars value; an empty value must be STATED by the overlay, not inherited in silence; a loud base sentinel must be explicitly overridden) and the half that self-activates. The guard is discovered by CONTENT — any tracked *.sh defining <name>_is_placeholder() — so landing one anywhere activates the second half with no edit here, and two definitions is a failure. The check never exits 3 again. Unscoped L0 goes 13 PASS / 1 SKIP -> 14 PASS / 0 SKIP.