Separate extraction/inventory and caller-selectable publication budgets in the shared firmware workflow. Preserve phase, selected timeout, verified progress, caller cancellation identity and committed observations through cleanup. Enforce monotonic expiry even before timer callbacks run.
Validated with 101 targeted tests, full static checks, documentation checks and real OpenWrt CLI/MCP workflows with digest and cleanup verification. Existing main CI failures are documented separately.
Fixes#4176.