Rehabilitating #431 (1/2?): threading fix + patching infrastructure - #442

.github/workflows/tests.yml (Line: 143, Col: 11): Conditional expression contains literal text outside replacement tokens. This will cause the expression to always evaluate to truthy. Did you mean to put the entire expression inside ${{ }}?

Node.js 20 is deprecated. The following actions target Node.js 20 but are being forced to run on Node.js 24: actions/setup-python@v5.6.0. For more information see: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-19-deprecation-of-node-20-on-github-actions-runners/