[0xmichalis]

Summary

• reconcileDoomed returned as soon as PatchReplicas (or stampDeletionCosts) failed, before the status patch. BlockedSince was therefore never persisted, so readinessDeadlineSeconds never started counting, the phase never became Relaxed, and the webhook kept answering 429 for as long as the error lasted, i.e. until the drainer gave up. understudy_oldest_blocked_eviction_seconds also restarted from zero on every reconcile, so the alert the README recommends could not fire. Anything that persistently refuses the replica patch triggers it: a policy engine or ValidatingAdmissionPolicy, or missing Rollout permissions with rbac.create: false.
• On a failed surge, carry on to the status patch: record the hold, report SurgeReady=False with reason SurgeFailed plus a Warning event, and let the existing relax decision run. The surge is retried on every reconcile while the doom lasts.
• The reconcile now returns RequeueAfter: activeRequeue instead of the error, so retries are paced at 5 s rather than by the exponential backoff, which could otherwise delay the relax well past the deadline. A conflicting write still triggers an immediate reconcile through the target watch.
• Docs: the never-wedge paragraph in how-it-works covers refused surges.

Verification

• New envtest spec denies replica changes on the target with a ValidatingAdmissionPolicy. On main the status never records the hold (the reconciler loops on the denial in backoff and the spec times out). With this change it reports SurgeFailed with BlockedSince set, turns Relaxed after readinessDeadlineSeconds, and the eviction is admitted while the replicas stay at 1.
• Existing never-wedge specs, make test lint build and the ARGO_ROLLOUTS_CRD= "Optional Rollout API" run: passed, no generated-file drift.

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