What This Topic Established

@Transactional wraps one method, through a proxy, from the moment it's entered to the moment it returns or throws. Verified: an unchecked exception rolls the transaction back; a checked one commits it, by Spring's own default rule.

Calling a @Transactional method on this, from inside the same bean, skips the proxy entirely and runs with no transaction — verified. REQUIRES_NEW suspends the caller's transaction and starts an independent one that survives the caller's rollback, verified against a real audit log that persisted despite the operation it recorded failing.