deployah — a3 CRITERIA 5 AND 6 VERIFIED NON-VACUOUSLY from the two logs, read on my side, hashes below. Both twohost halves are green and I am NOT taking that from the job conclusions.

CRITERION 6, role B from B'S OWN SERVED COUNT, not A's poll (twohost-b job 102294363818):
  TWOHOST OK: role B serving open.md + locked.md (waiting for 5 served cells)
  TWOHOST-WEB role B: served cell 1/5 ... 5/5   (all five lines present, 00:58:25.655Z)
  TWOHOST OK: role B served all 5 requester cells
  test two_host_web_role_b ... ok — 5 passed; 0 failed; finished in 22.73s
CRITERION 5, A's helper cell (twohost-a job 102294363789):
  test two_host_web_helper_role_a ... ok — 5 passed; 0 failed; finished in 6.11s
  6.11 s against the 900.40 s timeout it took before the ACL. Not "inside budget" — the stall is GONE.

THE ACL FIX IS PROVEN BY THE TRAFFIC SHAPE, not only by your probe. B's log carries exactly ONE "A not ready ... 10s bound" at 00:58:22.960Z followed by "the user's message was ADMITTED by A (Spooled)" at 00:58:25.154Z — one first-dial miss then admitted, 2.2 s. Against 75 bounds at 12.00 s cadence with zero admits before. That is the healthy shape hertz's write-up predicts for a reachable peer, arriving in the direction the symptom came from.

ONE OBSERVATION, yours to weigh, NOT raised as a blocker: A's log still carries HELPER_SERVE_FOR outcome=declined reason=the delivered body is not an envelope at 00:58:10.134Z. Same line as the a2 log. It sits in the LADDER step (before the web cells at 00:58:25Z) and that step passes, so it is not this milestone's red — but it is a declined serve inside a passing step, twice now, and if it is meant to decline the ledger should say so.

ACCEPTANCE STANDING at a3 terminal (9 jobs, notify landed ninth as always):
  1 FLOOR_DOCS PASS ................ NO — skipped behind the Phase B red
  2 Windows docs-drift success ..... NO — SKIPPED A FOURTH TIME, same IR-79 coupling
  3 FLOOR_END PASS ................. YES
  4 (a4 form) both victim cells pass  PARTIAL — webserve_attachment_e2e PASSED, mesh_recovery RED
  5 helper green on A .............. YES, 6.11 s
  6 role_b from B's served count ... YES, 5/5
  7 run terminal, every job green .. NO — test Windows only
So ONE job blocks the whole thing, and rerun-failed will re-run exactly that job: twohost-a and
twohost-b are NOT re-run and stand green from a3. I will say so explicitly in the verdict rather than
let a reader assume a4 re-proved them.

PRESERVED, hash them your side: .spt/preserved/golden-272-r2-attempt3-twohost/
  twohost-a-102294363789.log 286513 B sha256 2fa2414f9469e91528eea48b06e7f81ff2f6ace13ef4d2067e04dafa1e67bed6
  twohost-b-102294363818.log 450047 B sha256 ca0f60dc6e92d4854b8af6726f255080d9d35cbe5401ee9a9b4bdbdcb3b25abf
  + .MANIFEST.sha256

DEFENDER LINE WIRED as you asked, and I measured the read myself with a nuance that matters for
whoever automates this later: Get-MpPreference SUCCEEDS non-admin but returns ExclusionPath as the
LITERAL STRING "N/A: Must be an administrator to view exclusions". So a script testing
ExclusionPath -contains 'C:\actions-runner\_work' gets $false and reads it as ABSENT. It is a refusal
wearing the shape of a value — your "unreadable row, not an absent one" with the exact mechanism.
My dispatch prints "defender exclusion for runner work dir: unknown (non-admin read returns: ...)"
unless the operator confirms, in which case it quotes his answer. Also printing real-time protection
state (True) and qbittorrent's state at dispatch (pid 47056, cpu 5927.9 s, started 09-08 10:20:37Z —
corroborates your census exactly).

GATES ARE ALL GREEN RIGHT NOW except that I am holding minutes, not hours, for the operator on the
qbittorrent pause — the one lever that costs a message and might buy the last attempt its headroom.
If he declines or goes quiet I fire a4 as ruled with the census printed. Nothing else pends.