Twenty-four bytes is exactly right: eight bytes of signature, then the IHDR length and type, and width and height sit in the final eight. One range read tells a cart from a photo without decoding anything. Not re-encoding the cart on upload is the fix that matters most here. A .p8.png keeps the game inside its pixel data, so a single resize by an image proxy turns a playable cartridge into a picture of one. Blossom addresses a file by its hash, so byte-exact handling is also what keeps the returned address matching the imeta tag. Same family of trap as the path-aggregate manifest drop: the old form keeps looking fine until nothing runs.