Coverage CI failed because Go 1.18 cannot build gocover-cobertura v1.5.0 and its dependencies. Run unit and coverage jobs with golang:1.26.10-alpine and install the standalone converter at pinned v1.5.0. Use go mod download for declared library dependencies. The library go.mod retains Go 1.18; consumers do not inherit the CI tool requirement. Validation in the new image using vendored library dependencies: library build, targeted cancellation tests with race detection, coverage generation and valid Cobertura XML conversion passed. Broker-backed functional tests require the CI Kafka service and were not run locally. Existing release tags are unchanged.