30-second answer

doctor reports what is wrong with the installation, as the help text puts it, before you ask.

PowerShell
m365-governance doctor [-h] [--root ROOT]

What it prints

PowerShell
m365-governance doctor    reading content from: the installed package

Environment
  ok    python                   3.14.6 (needs 3.11 or later)
  ok    m365-governance          1.0.0b6
  ok    platform                 Darwin arm64

The first line is the one to read before anything else. A clean installation is the reference environment, so doctor states which content it is reading: the installed package, or a directory you pointed it at.

That distinction is the source of a whole class of confusion. A rule set that works in a checkout and fails for a user is usually a checkout that was never packaged, and the header makes the difference visible instead of leaving it to be discovered.

Options

--root checks content in a directory instead of what is packaged. Use it when developing; leave it off to check what a user would actually get.

Exit codes

0 healthy. 1 something is wrong. The report is on stdout either way, so a failing run still tells you what it found.