Currently, step-down in WT is not fully tested. In order to step-down the node is simply restarted. As a prerequisite for ASYNC step-down, we need to replace this crash/restart behavior with an "elegant" synchronous step-down.

In this phase, synchronous step-down will be executed purely by calling reconfigure(role=follower). Once the tests (test/format, test/model, test/suite) are updated, we need to spin up an Evergreen feature branch to run these test suites, capture the resulting bugs, and triage them out to the relevant sub-teams to establish a baseline of stability.

Acceptance Criteria / Tasks:

• Modify existing step-down code paths to step down elegantly using reconfigure(role=follower) instead of restarting.
• Set up a dedicated Evergreen feature branch to run the Python test suite and test/format against these changes.
• Run the test suites to identify recurring, consistent bugs triggered by the elegant step-down (ignoring extreme edge-cases or "once in a blue moon" anomalies for now).