The stale-claim reaper skips a task whose assignee holds an ACTIVE instance,
but that check reads the in-memory _instances registry — lost on an
orchestrator restart while the agent's container keeps running. The reaper then
released a task out from under a live agent it had merely forgotten (registry
amnesia). On a registry MISS, fall back to asking Docker directly
(_inspect_container_state); a still-running container is spared. A known
instance (active or stopped) stays authoritative, and an uninitialised registry
(unit-test harness) keeps the prior behaviour.