Great news, and thanks for taking the diagnostics all the way to the end. This thread is a great example of high quality data.
Everything lines up: in 3.8.11 we increased the McpProcess cold-start timeout from 10s to 30s, and on macOS 26 the helper now has enough time to start before the watchdog kills it. That’s why ipcReady arrives on the first attempt for you about 27s, and you no longer need a crash loop workaround or manual Developer: Reload Window.
Your conclusion is also correct: the empty com.apple.provenance blob was a symptom, not the root cause, and it doesn’t block functionality. We’re still looking separately at why the utility process cold start is slow on macOS 26, but the user-facing issue 90s loop plus the first task failing is fixed in 3.8.11.
Marking this as resolved. If a future update brings the behavior back and ipcReady starts failing again, please reply here and we’ll take another look.