Render effective Navigation submenu settings without persisting repairs

[adamziel]

What

This is a draft follow-up to WordPress#79000 that explores the render-time/effective-value approach suggested in review.

Instead of repairing the stale horizontal Navigation submenuVisibility: "always" state with setAttributes, this branch treats that impossible combination as the horizontal default while rendering/editor UI runs:

• effective submenuVisibility: hover
• effective showSubmenuIcon: true

The stored block attributes are left untouched unless the user makes an explicit attribute change.

Why

PR WordPress#79000 prevents passive rendering from dirtying related entities, but selecting the stale Navigation block can still dirty the template part because the repair effect still writes attributes. This draft removes that effect and applies the effective values to editor rendering/context instead.

The PHP render path also coerces the same impossible combination before rendering, so pre-existing stored invalid attributes do not render differently between editor and frontend.

Notes / risks to review

• This intentionally changes how pre-existing horizontal Navigation blocks with submenuVisibility: "always" are interpreted at render time.
• Inline Navigation inner blocks are rebuilt with effective context only when the effective attributes differ from stored attributes; this is to keep child block context consistent without changing the common path.
• This does not make impossible states unrepresentable. A deeper data-model/UI change would still be needed for that.

Testing

• php -l packages/block-library/src/navigation/index.php
• node --check test/e2e/specs/editor/blocks/navigation-passive-rendering.spec.js
• git diff --check
• wp-scripts format --check packages/block-library/src/navigation/edit/index.js test/e2e/specs/editor/blocks/navigation-passive-rendering.spec.js

Local wp-env/E2E is still blocked in this workspace because Docker/OrbStack is not running.

[adamziel]

Closing; this draft belongs in WordPress/gutenberg instead.

[github-actions]

Size Change: +64 B (0%)

Total Size: 8.6 MB

📦 View Changed

Filename	Size	Change
build/scripts/block-library/index.min.js	324 kB	+64 B (+0.02%)

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