v1.8.9's move to Router.SendPaymentV2 shipped without fee_limit_sat,
and the v2 route treats an ABSENT fee limit as zero allowed fees.
Every real route carries a routing fee (the 2-hop route here: 1.5
sats), so the pathfinder rejected them all and the wallet answered
"No route to the recipient" on EVERY send — all day, on healthy
channels with plenty of liquidity both ways.
The router debug log makes it unambiguous:
wallet payment (v1.8.9 backend): fee_limit=0 mSAT -> no route
same payment by hand (lncli --fee_limit=100): fee_limit=100000 mSAT -> settles in 0.65s
My earlier "pipeline verified" claim was wrong — the manual lncli
verification set a fee limit by hand and masked this exact bug. The
400k that succeeded this morning went through the pre-update backend
on the pre-update LND.
Payments now carry lncli's own default budget — the payment amount
(100%), preferring the payer-supplied amount for zero-value invoices
and the invoice's own amount otherwise, with a nominal floor so the
limit can never be zero. Unit-pinned so it cannot regress.