Night-watch caught a 21s wedge (vs 5-13min baseline) landing exactly on the boot ping-diagnosis + wifi-stats-dump burst, which hammered the freshly-recovered SDIO link on every reboot. That scaffolding proved connectivity long ago; removing it makes each recovery light and clean. ping_target/ping_diag_task kept as no-op symbols for manual use. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>