I think related to the PATH handling changes in 2.24, a coworker had a symlink to a file in their path by accident which caused a system binary path search to break near here with an error like

native_engine.IntrinsicError: Not a directory (os error 20)

which was pretty difficult for them to figure out I know there's this discussion about

PathNamespace.SYSTEM must an absolute path

but should I file a separate issue about this one? Or just add some details there?

Separate issue sounds good to me, even if it ends up being a single PR fixing it