The bridge was falling back to mock mode with a confusing
'Cannot read properties of null (reading code)' error. The actual
underlying error (ECONNREFUSED, timeout, protocol mismatch) was
being swallowed by our error handler that did `(e as Error).message`
on a value that was sometimes null.
Wrap the kRPC client connect() in per-step try/catch with a
formatErr() helper that handles:
- null / undefined
- strings
- Error with .code (NodeJS.ErrnoException)
- arbitrary objects (JSON.stringify fallback)
Now when the bridge can't reach kRPC you get a real error like
'kRPC RPC TCP connect to 127.0.0.1:50000 failed: code=ECONNREFUSED:
connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:50000' instead of the cryptic
null-code message.
Also fixed the bridge's main() error handler to be null-safe.
Discovered while debugging the user's first end-to-end run on
Windows: kRPC was reachable (Test-NetConnection succeeded) but
the bridge couldn't complete the handshake. With this fix we'll
see the real failure mode on the next attempt.
Mavis