Fix storage recovery and deferred runtime state

Recover usable ESP32 preferences and channels before permitting replacement; keep identity and ACL persistence transactional and complete.

Preserve MQTT commit boundaries, restore OTA identity and policy after deferred allocation, retain radio gain retries, and reject invalid flood limits. Add production-path fault regressions and CI coverage.

test/test_cli_settings_contract.py

@@ -210,7 +210,8 @@ class CLISettingsContractTest(unittest.TestCase):
         source = COMMON.read_text(encoding='utf-8')
         setter, getter = methods(source, 'void CommonCLI::handle')
         keys = ['radio', 'freq', 'af', 'dutycycle', 'int.thresh', 'cad', 'radio.rxgain',
-                'tx', 'rxdelay', 'agc.reset.interval', 'multi.acks', 'txdelay', 'direct.txdelay']
+                'tx', 'rxdelay', 'agc.reset.interval', 'multi.acks', 'txdelay', 'direct.txdelay',
+                'flood.max', 'flood.max.advert', 'flood.max.unscoped']
         # Preserve the actual conditions and bodies. The only excluded branches
         # are unrelated settings needing board-specific dependencies.
         set_blocks = [extract_braced(setter, 'if (strncmp(config, "path.hash.mode", 14)')]