An earlier fix narrowed a failed step's cancellation to its own branch, which was right — but three run-wide stops had been leaning on the same flag to mean “end everything”: the session spend ceiling, the fifty-step limit, and that limit again inside the quality-gate retry loop. A run could keep spending on branches that were not downstream of the failure. All three end the whole run now, after the current wave's outputs are merged, so work you have already paid for still reaches you.