Machines without @factory fell back to a degraded reset that kept the current system and only wiped user state. Turn them away with an explanation instead, and drop the degraded staging path. The first-boot worker still honors a wipe-degraded marker so a reset staged by an older version finishes its scrub rather than handing the machine over with the seller's accounts intact. Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>