TextRange

The smallest and largest text seen at a path, possibly truncated.

Truncation always widens, never narrows, so a truncated range is still a correct range: min is a prefix of the true minimum and therefore no larger than it, and max is a prefix with its last byte incremented and therefore no smaller than the true maximum. That is what keeps a bound usable for skipping — a narrowed bound would let a query decide a segment cannot hold a value it does hold, which is the one failure a statistic must never cause.

A value long enough that no upper bound can be represented — sixty-four bytes of 0xFF, which no UTF-8 text produces — leaves max null, meaning no claim is made.