Comment by lrvick

We only re-bootstrap the layers which had dependencies change under them. Early parts of the tree rarely change so we often do not have to rebuild these across releases, but very late tree things like rust depend on almost everything and something in the rust dependency graph changes almost every release.

Using binaries from past releases is a strict downgrade in terms of verification speed, as it means a new independent reproducible build verifier must now build both trees, doubling the release verification time, and erasing any wins mold3 could otherwise offer.

Google can rely on lots of centralized internal provenance tooling to prove cached binaries are not tampered with to other Googlers but when the goal is proving end to end full source bootstrapped build integrity to any interested user from the public in the least time possible, the requirements are significantly higher.