Retryability is marked by presence, not by a boolean

The absence of the marker is load-bearing: the retry gate tests for the literal value true, so anything else (including an explicit false) means do not retry.

What it means

Retryability is not a boolean field with a default; it is a key that either exists or does not. A retry gate that treats it like an ordinary flag — false as an authoritative "no", any truthy value as a "yes" — reads this backwards. The gate here checks the value against the literal true and nothing else, so writing false on purpose changes nothing: the failure still does not retry, exactly as an absent key does not.

Example

The same node failing twice, once in a way the runtime marks retryable and once in a way it does not.

{"error_retryable": true}

{}