Ubuntu 24.04's ESM pin (priority 510) outranks GitHub's apt repo (500), so Ubuntu's broken 2.45.0 kept winning the candidate slot. Three layers of failure: a GraphQL deprecation message that was actually the error, GitHub's repo URL, and the ESM pin itself.

Got 'fatal: loose object is corrupt' when running git log. Three empty object files, repository broken. Here's how I recovered everything using git fetch and why moving files instead of deleting them was right call.