Control outputs are never stripped

What it means

Control outputs are exempt from every lever that strips an ordinary port — the node type's own default, an instance override, all of it. They are not something an author shows or hides at all; they are the engine's own channel, and branching and state merging depend on them arriving whole every time, whatever exposure a workflow otherwise records for that node.

Example

A node's type marks every one of its outputs — active_branches, state_update, and an ordinary port — hidden, and the workflow's own instance override hides state_update again on top of that: the least favourable exposure available for all three.

{"state_update": {"iterator": {"index": 1}}, "active_branches": "true", "debug": "internal trace"}

{"state_update": {"iterator": {"index": 1}}, "active_branches": "true"}

debug, an ordinary output hidden the same way, is the one key stripping removes.