When every record agrees, the field has told you nothing. The dangerous part is that it does not look like nothing: it looks like a tracked attribute. It has a type, it appears in the documentation, downstream code branches on it. A reviewer reading the schema concludes the project distinguishes three kinds of recommendation. A reviewer reading the data would have found it distinguishes none.
The failure that produces this is almost never “nobody set the field”. It is that the code which would set it cannot run. Here, both branches that could assign a non-default status read a list that no qualifying record had, so they were unreachable on the actual corpus — and unreachable code fails silently by construction, because the way it announces itself is by not happening.
So the check has to be on the data, not on the code. “Do the records disagree?” is answerable by looking at them and unanswerable by reading the branch that was supposed to make them disagree.
Applied here: luria lint reports inert-status when every document in a
scheme shares one status, above a floor where uniformity stops being
explainable by youth. The SOTA scheme now holds 119 Active and one
Deferred — a thin margin, and an honest one, because the Deferred record
is the one hedge the corpus actually contained.
The corollary: a uniform field is not automatically a bug, and treating it as one produces a check people switch off. Sometimes every record really is in force. The finding is “this field is currently carrying no information”, addressed to a person, and a scheme that declares a vocabulary of one is a project saying so deliberately.