What broke
A session opened on a branch with no journal entry, so entry fell back to an older entry whose next action read "authorise phase 3" — while HEAD was the merge commit that delivered phase 3. The entry had not been superseded; it had been completed, by a session whose own entry was still sitting in an open pull request.
The rule it paid for
Precedence orders sources, not claims. A next action that observed Git already falsifies is not current, whatever its rank, and the entry that won says so.