MicroPython over the QEMU worker stopped loading: every project failed with
"the board stopped answering while writing _vlx_main.py", the board sitting
idle at a healthy `>>>`.
The uploader shipped in 664c3581 waits for the board's end-of-execution marker
before sending the next step — that wait is the whole point, it replaced a
fixed delay that pushed 64 bytes every 150 ms. The marker never arrived. Raw
REPL answers each statement with `OK` <EOT> traceback <EOT> `>` and not one
newline in it, and the UART buffer flushed only on newline, carriage return, a
period or 256 bytes. The answer sat in the buffer; the uploader timed out
waiting for something the backend was holding.
Nothing had needed that answer before: the old uploader pasted the whole
program and never listened. EOT is a message boundary in this protocol, so the
buffer treats it as one.
Found by forcing a MicroPython project down the QEMU path with ?esp32sim=qemu —
the residual risk 664c3581 flagged and could not exercise, because velxio.dev
routes every supported ESP32 kind to the in-browser engines. Self-hosters from
this repo have no engines and always take this path, so it broke for exactly
the people the #219 fix was written for.