fix(release): restore the New Features section dropped from published notes

[ardelperal]

Closes #296

v1.16.0 was published with its entire ### New Features section missing — all 16 bullets, covering the VBA node-discovery epic #264. Separately, the promotion commit never reached main, so main still carried a pre-release CHANGELOG and package.json.

Root cause

splitSubsections matched sub-headings with /^### (\w+)\s*$/. ### New Features does not match. In the v1.16.0 block it was the first heading, so its header line and all 16 bullets fell into unrelSubs.leading — which the Case B merge never reads. Dropped, no warning, exit 0.

The workflow log states it plainly:

prepare-release: 1.16.0 — merged 22 Unreleased entries into existing [1.16.0] block

22 of 38.

Compounding it: the promote step pushes to whichever branch triggered the run. The run was dispatched from release/v1.16.0, so commit fe3d598 landed there and vanished when the branch was deleted.

Changes

Root cause

• Match heading text verbatim, so multi-word headings are recognised.
• Carry over entries that precede the first heading instead of dropping them. Whatever the heading vocabulary becomes later, losing content is no longer a silent outcome.
• Guard the workflow: it refuses to run outside the repository's default branch.

State reconciliation

• Promote [Unreleased] into ## [1.16.0] - 2026-09-03 — 38 entries, four sections — using the fixed script.
• package.json to 1.16.0, matching what is published.
• Point every version link reference at this fork. They named the upstream project, which has no such tags, so every version heading in the file linked to a 404. Mechanical and separate from the defect above; called out so it can be reviewed on its own terms.

Why this shipped green

Every fixture in __tests__/prepare-release.test.ts used the single-word Keep-a-Changelog vocabulary (### Added, ### Fixed, ### Security). The repo's CHANGELOG moved to ### New Features / ### Breaking Changes and the tests never followed.

Verification

Seven tests added, using the real vocabulary. Five fail against the previous code — verified by reverting both parts of the fix and re-running, not assumed:

Test	Pre-fix
carries every New Features entry into [version] when merging	✗ fails
reproduces the v1.16.0 shape: New Features first, above an empty pre-created block	✗ fails
merges into a matching multi-word heading instead of duplicating it	✗ fails
carries over entries written before any heading rather than dropping them	✗ fails
the published notes carry the New Features section end to end	✗ fails
still merges the single-word headings the older entries use	✓ passes (must-stay-silent)
leaves [Unreleased] empty so the next release cannot republish these entries	✓ passes (must-stay-silent)

The last two pin behaviour that was never broken and must not change.

• npx tsc --noEmit clean.
• prepare-release + daemon-release suites: 47 passed, 1 skipped.
• Workflow YAML parses; the guard is the first step in the job.
• Promotion output checked by hand: 38 bullets across New Features / Changed / Tests / Fixes, and the extractor reproduces all four sections from the promoted block.

Not covered

The published v1.16.0 release notes are corrected separately through the GitHub API — a release body is not repository content and this PR cannot reach it. The v1.16.0 git tag still points at the pre-reconciliation commit; retagging a published release is destructive and was deliberately not done.

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