Every GitOps setup meets the same moment: something is on fire, someone runs kubectl scale on prod, and the fix works. What happens next depends on two settings that rarely get checked before an incident: self-healing on the GitRepo, and pause on the cluster.I ran all three combinations in a lab on Rancher 2.15.1 with Fleet (biased, I work at SUSE). Three EKS clusters: dev and staging on Kubernetes 1.36, prod on 1.35. Cases 1 and 2 used the guestbook app from the public rancher/fleet-examples repo, with the frontend Deployment at 3 replicas. Case 3 used the podinfo Helm chart from my own repo. Every manual change went through the scale button in the Rancher UI, which sends a PATCH to the Deployment's scale subresource, the same request kubectl scale makes.