simple-salesforce-mdapi-deploy-expects-file-path-or-io-not-base64
SfdcMetadataApi.deploy() internally reads and base64-encodes the input via _read_deploy_zip — it expects either a file path string or an IO[bytes] object. Passing a base64-encoded string causes a silent wrong-data deploy. Correct fix: decode base64 to bytes and wrap in io.BytesIO before passing to deploy().