I appreciate the reply!
As for question 1, I tested thoroughly, and I’m 100% sure I used a different account for the bot and the following message. I sent the last message using the Twitch web client, using my personal account, while the bot used its own account, on a single socket connection in Python. Once I sent that single message using my personal account, messages from both my personal account and the bot were ignored for the next 30 minutes. When I conducted the same test without sending any messages from my personal account, it worked as expected, and no mutes occurred.
Anyway, no worries if that’s all you can do to help. I’ll do more testing to make sure I’m not missing something, and work around it if I can’t solve the issue.