The short-comp routing gate can only read a live element count when a
probe session exists, and the first v0.7.83 data shows that is far rarer
than estimated: 17% of renders (86/503), not the ">=28%" the video-presence
proxy suggested. The other 83% fall back to a static source scan, which
is exactly blind to the shape that motivated the live count — small
markup, thousands of script-created nodes.
That leaves the fleet element-count distribution unknowable for most
renders, and the observed distribution is already surprising: p99 ~900,
max 1,420 against a 2,500 ceiling calibrated on 7k/20k/40k synthetic
nodes. Either the ceiling is close to irrelevant, or the large-DOM tail
is hiding in the 83% we cannot see. Both readings change what PR B
should do, and neither is decidable from probed renders alone (they are
a biased sample — they got a probe *because* they carry media or
unresolved compositions).
So measure it where every render already goes: capture-session init.
`collectSessionInitTelemetry` gains a querySelectorAll("*") count beside
the tween count it already collects, riding the same channel to
`observability_init_element_count`. This is observational only — capture
has begun, far too late to route on — and it deliberately does not feed
the gate. It answers the distribution question the gate cannot.
Coverage for this channel is proven rather than assumed: the tween-count
fix that shipped in v0.7.83 took the clamped-parallel bucket from 0/272
renders to 217/217, and 23.1% -> 100% overall.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>