A host hold is a shield, and shields have a failure mode: a booking that really was cancelled can be kept forever, sending a cleaner to an empty flat and lying to the calendar. Lemon's first implementation never cleared the hold; the review-after-7-days rule (HOST_HOLD_REVIEW_AFTER_MS) was added when production showed held bookings stale for a month. The principle: any booking kept alive by a shield rather than seen in the feed must become visible to the host as such.
A hold is the right answer when the host has checked the platform and the reservation is there; it is the wrong answer to a feed link that has silently expired, which is why the dashboard also shows when a feed last synced successfully.