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This is all valid critique, but I have great difficulty believing Google's crawler behaves anything like yours.

I would expect Google to handle broken or missing sitemaps, honestly.

I wish. Not only do they sometimes randomly fail, Google search console will not tell your why. I've got a site with a sitemap which passes in every validator I could find, yet Google doesn't read it and GSC just reports "error" without any details. Google is big enough to go "we don't care, it's your problem".

I’ll still catch myself thinking this way even though The Great Disillusionment was like twenty years ago.

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