A JSON decoder reads one value and stops, so a file holding a declaration and
then anything else parsed as the declaration and the rest was never looked at.
The machine applies something, reports success, and what it applied is not what
the file says — the same fault this host refuses everywhere else, in its
quietest form.
Not hypothetical. A test harness had been appending a line to the substrate
bundle by accident; every apply kept working and nothing said so for as long as
it was wrong. That is how the bug was found, and it is the argument for the
refusal: a file with something after it may be a truncated rewrite or two
declarations run together, and applying the first would be applying something
nobody wrote.
Trailing whitespace is not "something after it".
jschoubben
f9c70a7c97