getCategoryTree cached the built tree for 3600s unconditionally, and the
read guard `if (cached)` treats an empty array as a hit. So a single
transient decode/proxy failure (emex via the flaky DataImpulse pool) seeded
0 categories and poisoned the catalog with an empty tree for a full hour,
even after the source recovered. Cache an empty tree for only 60s — it
self-heals on the next request post-recovery while still throttling
re-decode during a genuine outage.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Semih Yesilyurt
220988c02e