this is a pain to track and, it turns out, buys us virtually nothing on flagm
systems. rip it out.
this fixes a bug with failing to set in all the right places.
on non-flagm systems there's a slight instcountci impact, but that is mostly
mitigated by the earlier patches in the series. so overall a wash there but
worth it for making the codebase easier
to reason about.
replaces #4163