A job marked for a reference check was checked when the worker picked
it. A removal that kept failing then left it first in line on every
attempt, holding up the uploads behind it, and a staged job took the
removal on a path that could throw out of retryNow. A marked job now
never uploads: each retry first settles the checks it can (online, no
upload running), a failed removal leaves the job marked and waiting,
and every other job goes on.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>