How the promotion is implemented

VER1606 is promoted at report time. The code's registry entry keeps severity: "warning", the rule's detection logic is identical under both profiles, and the profile changes only how the finding is classified in the report it lands in. This is the ADR-0003 discipline applied: a profile is a policy over a stable registry, and a policy that mutated the registry would make VER1606 mean two different things depending on which run you read.

The observable consequences of selecting the profile, for a Record with a parent reference lacking content_hash:

Moving the exit code is the point. A warning that no pipeline gate reads is a warning a deployment cannot act on, and the whole reason a high-assurance operator wants this profile is to make the absence stop a publish.