Release v3.8.31 — see CHANGELOG.md [3.8.31] for full notes and contributors.
Merged over known non-blocking reds (all correctness gates green): Integration Tests (2/2) is env/flaky (polls a real upstream batch that did not complete in the poll window); SonarQube/SonarCloud is the advisory server-side new-code quality gate. Unit (8 shards), Coverage, Node 22/24/26, Lint, PR Test Policy, Quality Ratchet, Docs-Strict, Quality-Extended and all 4 CodeQL analyses are green.
Integrated into release/v3.8.8. Applied review fixes: moved the SELECT 1 into a pingDb() db helper (no raw SQL in route, Hard Rule #5) + the 503 catch no longer leaks err.message (Hard Rule #12). Thanks @herjarsa!
