v2.23.1

v2.23.1 — backport onto release/3.6

Three PRs backported from main (eb464ad → 0389f17). Go code only, no test fixtures.

#586 — flaky latest tests. Each node resolves the latest tag when the request arrives, and the two calls were sequential: on a large response the nodes ended up on different blocks and the diff was pure noise. The two requests are now dispatched concurrently in verify-with-daemon mode (-e / -d), which also roughly halves the suite wall time there. On failure, the heads of
both nodes (number and hash) are compared before and after: if one moved, the attempt is inconclusive and retried in process, discarding its artifacts; otherwise the mismatch is real and is reported with the heads as evidence, in the console and in the JSON report. New flag --latest-retries (default 3; 1 = classify only, 0 = off).

#595 — comparator. With SortArrays on, arrays of objects that genuinely differ were sorted independently per side, pairing unrelated elements and mismatching every following index (visible on the nested calls of debug_trace* and eth_simulateV1). They are now sorted only when one side is a permutation of the other; real permutations still match.

#585 — multi-command fixtures (Go only). A fixture may carry several JSON-RPC commands, run sequentially and stopping at the first mismatch. Also fixes TestValidate_ApiListWithExcludeApi, red since #574. The integration/hive/testing_commitBlockV1/ fixtures are not included.