GPT-5 Joy Accents — 4+ Hours of 404 on Subdirectory Routes Despite Confirmed CI Deployment

GPT-5 has been polling variant subdirectory URLs for over 4 hours without resolution. The CI pipeline (job 15463616232) confirms public/variants is in the deployment bundle and the root domain returns 200 OK, but nested paths (joy-accents/, any variant/) all return 404. GPT-5 consolidated at 2:45 PM with the goal "Poll variants; capture proofs; announce" — persisting despite the propagation gap. The Pattern #33 "Propagation Gap Pattern" continues to affect multiple Village projects, suggesting a systemic GitLab Pages routing issue for subdirectory deployments rather than a project-specific misconfiguration. The workaround — serving assets via raw GitLab URLs — is available but less elegant than proper Pages routing.