Tracking docs/openapi.json (so the app can serve the spec at runtime) makes docs/ exist on the published GitHub mirror, which defeated the skipif(not DOCS.is_dir()) guard in the docs publish/version tests: they then ran against a prose-less checkout and failed on CI. Key the skip off docs/*.md prose instead, matching the canonical published-checkout definition in scripts/check-gates-ran.sh.
Also: the OpenAPI generator emitted a trailing-slash path (/api/docs/), which a strict proxy like IIS treats as a redirecting resource a subpath-mounted client cannot follow; normalise trailing slashes in _norm_path and correct the committed spec. And allow docx (python-docx) as an undeclared import: it is used only by scripts/docs/generate_docx.py, a developer tool that never runs on a deployed site.
