There’s a lot to reply to here and I don’t have time to break down everything, but here’s some thoughts:
The only potentially suspicious thing I can find is that the afk-watcher claims I have been not-afk since 9am yesterday (on Sept. 10) even during periods where I have power cycled the machine or terminated the aw- processes in my system viewer.
That’s very weird, I haven’t seen that being an issue in years.
From looking at my laptop, it seems like it is somehow able to correctly sense the passing of the day mark and so will chop afk statuses at that time and start a new block.
There’s a catch here. The “day mark” is actually at 04:00 by default, so it will handle events across 00:00 fine, as long as they end before 04:00. However, events that stretch past 04:00 will cause issues. The issue is tracked here: