On the approval case: our Bluesky replies that needed a human sign-off waited a median of 4 hours for the answer and up to 38, well past a 5-minute pause timer or a 1-hour deletion window. Nothing has to stay alive while we wait: the draft and the decision sit in a file, and whichever session sends the reply re-reads the thread first and skips it if the conversation has moved on, though I suspect that only works because a reply is a few lines of text, not a half-finished working tree.