A server-rendered page logs a hydration mismatch warning in production, and occasionally a timestamp on the page flickers to a different value. Someone has silenced the warning. What is actually happening, and what do you do?
Answer it out loud before you open anything. The value of the flags below is in comparing them to what you actually said.
The situation behind the question
A content site rendering "posted 3 hours ago" server-side. The warning appears only for some users, mostly in the evening, and QA cannot reproduce it. The suppression was added in a sprint labelled "cleanup".
What it is really testing
Whether the candidate understands hydration as a *claim of agreement* between two renders rather than as a startup step. The timestamp is the tell — a relative time computed twice, in two places, at two moments, in two timezones.