secrets: inherit not working in reusable workflows is two different failures wearing one name, and only one of them prints anything. Either the run is rejected before a job starts, which is loud and precise, or the called workflow reads an empty string and fails later on whatever it tried to authenticate to.

Inheritance is per hop, not per chain. Quoted from GitHub's reuse-workflows guide: "Secrets are only passed to directly called workflow".

What this error means

Start by asking whether any job ran at all. If the run has zero jobs and a startup failure, GitHub rejected the workflow before scheduling it, and the message names the secret and the side it is missing from. That is the loud shape, and it is what you get from explicit forwarding, never from inherit .…