The platform is up, but one dependency path is not.

Use this when file-system drift shows up as general instability before the user recognizes it as a storage health problem. These issues are easy to misread because the operating system still responds while one control path, runtime dependency, or trust assumption is already out of alignment.

The symptom usually appears downstream from the real change.

• macOS assumptions are often changed indirectly by updates, policy, hardware changes, or cleanup work that looked harmless at the time.
• APFS assumptions are often changed indirectly by updates, policy, hardware changes, or cleanup work that looked harmless at the time.
• Disk Utility assumptions are often changed indirectly by updates, policy, hardware changes, or cleanup work that looked harmless at the time.
• Recovery assumptions are often changed indirectly by updates, policy, hardware changes, or cleanup work that looked harmless at the time.