Four sites still compared the verification mode to a literal after the
module owning that policy existed. One of them mattered: an unrecognised
mode fell through to MD5 verification while compute_severity was scoring
it as existence, so a typo in a platform YAML produced a report whose
checks and severities described different platforms.
The mode is normalized once per run and the consumers ask for what they
need. A test reads the sources and fails on a literal comparison, so the
next consumer cannot quietly grow a fifth copy.