I don't think the point of SLO = flakiness out of control. The point of framing it as SLO is the realization that neither extremes are good. Flakiness cannot be allowed to get out of control that some efforts must be spent to contain it, but it's also unnecessarily perfectionist and thus the waste of precious engineering bandwidth to eliminate them completely. The whole point is to avoid "bureaucratic games", as you call it.
My theory is that the lack of easy mechanism to measure the flakiness is stalling the progress. If the overall flakiness can be measured, and the top offending tests identified, then I think it becomes no brainer to spend efforts curtailing them back when the flakiness gets too high, but otherwise exclude flaky tests from, say, PR merge gate.
My theory is that the lack of easy mechanism to measure the flakiness is stalling the progress. If the overall flakiness can be measured, and the top offending tests identified, then I think it becomes no brainer to spend efforts curtailing them back when the flakiness gets too high, but otherwise exclude flaky tests from, say, PR merge gate.