I’m not sure whether the difference in behavior here is intended (well, as someone who isn’t on the dev team, I wouldn’t be). The behavior around rulebook success and failure when other rules/rulebooks are followed is very subtle, or perhaps completely opaque to me. I just rediscovered this discussion of the difference between the specific check rules getting anonymously abided by and the specific carry out rules getting considered, and I had completely forgotten how that makes a difference.
But the behavior where including the “say” phrase affects whether the action fails absolutely has to be a bug. I looked at the generated I6 code for a few seconds but I couldn’t figure out what was going on.