The Apify Actor Execution Lifecycle: 8 Decision Engines

The problem: Apify gives you SUCCEEDED or FAILED . That's it. No "your input had 3 unknown fields the actor will silently drop." No "your output's email field went 61% null overnight." No "this pipeline has a field-mapping mismatch on stage 2 that won't blow up until 4 minutes into the run." Every Apify developer eventually writes their own version of these checks. Bash glue, a JSON schema validator, a null-rate Cron job, a hand-wired Slack webhook. It works until it doesn't, and you spend a Sat