Status: OUT
The WAL carries vestigial recovery-related infrastructure: sequence numbers are monotonically assigned under lock and stored in every record but never consulted for ordering, deduplication, or gap detection during recovery (file position alone determines replay order), and checkpoint records occupy positions in the same sequence space but are neither searched for during recovery scanning nor used as truncation watermarks.
Sequence numbers and checkpoint records form a coherent recovery protocol that was implemented but never wired up
Depends on (SL): wal-seq-nums-are-vestigial, checkpoint-record-not-used-in-recovery, checkpoint-record-unused-for-truncation