Understanding failure in automation

Configuration
1

Hello all,

I am trying to understand a recent failure in an automation. Here is the automation:

alias: Turn on lights at sunset
description: ""
triggers:
  - trigger: sun
    event: sunset
    offset: 0
conditions: []
actions:
  - action: light.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: light.mantle
  - action: light.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      area_id: back_yard
  - action: light.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: light.christmas_tree

The trouble started after we put the Christmas tree away, and my smartplug was unplugged. I noticed that the lights were not turning on outside. I looked at the traces, and found that they weren’t executing. After some debugging, I realized that the automation was getting “stuck” trying to turn on the Christmas tree. Because the mode defaulted to “Single”, it would not run the next day’s automation since the previous day’s had not finished.

My question is: Why didn’t the light.turn_on action just fail or time-out? Waiting for 24 hours seems crazy. Is this the expected behavior? My light is a zigbee2mqtt ZigBee smartplug that is converted in HA to appear as a light. Maybe the light conversion helper doesn’t handle failures properly from the underlying device? Any ideas?

Thanks

Ed