Tests are flakey and unstable

[runspired]

tests will fail in unpredictable patterns, and this is somewhat hidden by CI timing out. Obervable in #381 where a readme change leads to failures.

[mixonic]

There are two issues:

• First, there are unpredictable failures in the test suite. These are papered over by a retry script which re-runs the whole suite on CI if there is a failure, and only gives up after several attempts.
• Second, there is something in the test suite or runner which causes the github action to hang. This second item is what the timeout circumvents. Without a timeout, it simply hangs for hours.