System and competitive boundary
Read event/operation identity, generation and sequence; reject duplicates or stale epochs and record local checkpoint/recovery decisions before forwarding eligible work. Local admission does not by itself create a distributed exactly-once guarantee.
Optimized comparator: Optimized Kafka transactions and application idempotency with the same retry, crash and replay injections and independently recorded external effects.
Scoped existing numbers: Historical Mac2 local guard-event median 105.30 ns; separate Linux C++20 test ~420 ns/event under a different protocol; 8,192/8,192 local admission checks. No live Kafka exactly-once or cross-host proof.
Production SLA, real-customer ROI and incremental advantage over the buyer's optimized implementation remain separate acceptance gates.