Pulling a kernel out of a legacy core does not produce governance. It produces governance only if each invariant is canonized and locked at the moment it is lifted. Otherwise the coupling moved; it did not leave.
Decomposition feels like progress: the kernel is its own repository now, the legacy core is thinner. But moving code across a boundary is not the same as establishing one. If the invariants the kernel must hold — its decision contract, its receipt path, its drift rules — are not written down and frozen as it leaves, the boundary is a line on a diagram.
The discipline that makes extraction real is canonizing each invariant the moment it is lifted, and locking it. A boundary is enforceable only when both sides can point to a frozen contract for what crosses it. Without that, extraction relocates the coupling into a new repository and calls it architecture.