Curate Vale to Std + Temporal rules only (drop Google/Microsoft/alex)

[Duncanma]

Summary

• .vale.ini (the full/advisory config) ran ~77 rules from Google, Microsoft, alex, Temporal — none of them individually chosen to reflect Temporal's writing style, just whatever came bundled when those packages were first vendored in 2023. .vale-ci.ini (what actually gates PRs) only ever enabled 3 of them (Temporal.Headings, Temporal.RelativeLinks, Google.Latin).
• Replaces the full set with Std (Vale's shared prose-rule library, vendored in Vendor Vale's new Std package (groundwork, no rule changes) #5291) plus Temporal's own 8 custom rules, and nothing else. BasedOnStyles is now Vale, Std, Temporal.
• Tunes Std.Readability.SentenceLength[max] = 30 to match the old Microsoft.SentenceLength threshold exactly, rather than adopting Std's stricter 25-word default.
• Swaps .vale-ci.ini's Google.Latin for its direct Std equivalent (Std.Abbreviations.Latin), removing the last Google/Microsoft/alex reference from the CI gate.
• Deletes the now fully-unreferenced vendored vale/styles/Google, vale/styles/Microsoft, vale/styles/alex packages (74 files).
• Rewords readme/STYLE.md's opening paragraph — the philosophical lineage (modeled on Google's style guide) stays, but it no longer implies Vale enforces the Google/Microsoft packages directly.

Known, deliberate tradeoff: alex was the only package checking inclusive language and profanity (ableist terms, race/LGBTQ terminology, profanity blocklists, condescension). Std has no equivalent (only two narrow rules for gendered pronouns/terms). This coverage is dropped without replacement — documented in a .vale.ini comment so it reads as a decision, not an oversight.

Verification

• CI-scoped lint (vale --config .vale-ci.ini docs/): Std.Abbreviations.Latin reproduces every Google.Latin finding (91 "e.g.", 3 "i.e." — identical) plus 38 new legitimate ones ("etc.", "vs.", which Google.Latin didn't cover). 430 → 468 total findings.
• Full advisory lint (yarn lint's two commands), before/after by rule:
  • Exact-count matches: Std.Grammar.PassiveVoice (22,382, was Google.Passive), Std.Readability.SentenceLength (4,308, was Microsoft.SentenceLength — confirms the threshold tuning worked), Std.Usage.FirstPersonPlural (1,947, was Google.We), Std.Usage.FirstPersonSingular (1,071, was Microsoft.FirstPerson).
  • Std.Abbreviations.Acronyms (8,100) replaces what were two near-duplicate rules firing separately (Google.Acronyms 8,099 + Microsoft.Acronyms 8,099) — real de-duplication, not a loss of coverage.
  • Some drift on rules with more complex matching logic: Std.Punctuation.OxfordComma fires more (767 vs. 295 combined) — spot-checked, catching real missed-comma cases the old simpler rule didn't. Std.Punctuation.Spacing fires less (689 vs. 1,526) — narrower detection than the old rule.
  • Total findings dropped 157,515 → 99,848 (~37%), mostly from removing low-signal rules with no history of being individually valued (Google.Parens "use parentheses judiciously" alone was 10,851 hits; Google.Headings was 8,333, mostly redundant with/false-positiving against Temporal.Headings's curated exception list).
  • 934 alex.* findings (Ablist, Condescending, Race, LGBTQ, ProfanityMaybe/Likely, Suicide) are gone with no replacement — the known tradeoff above.
• vale/test/*.md fixtures re-run: bad.md/good.md still exercise Temporal.terms/badwords/complexwords and Vale's core spelling check correctly; headings-*.md and relative-links-*.md (pure Temporal-rule fixtures, untouched by this change) behave identically to main.
• git diff --stat: 3 files modified (.vale.ini, .vale-ci.ini, readme/STYLE.md), 74 files deleted, nothing else touched.

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated
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