The hot big bang necessarily passes through the GUT scale, the symmetry breaking necessarily knots spacetime with magnetic monopoles at one per horizon volume, and the predicted relics would outweigh the universe. Fifty years of searches find zero. Inflation is hired as janitor, diluting the inevitable production into invisibility, provided it occurs at the right moment with reheating tuned below re-production: a prediction and its erasure sold as a package.
The monopole problem exists only because the model's thermal history is assumed to climb through 10¹⁶ GeV: a singular origin makes arbitrarily high early temperatures mandatory, so every phase transition particle physics can imagine must have happened, and its debris must be explained away.
SCT's thermal history has a ceiling. The collision cascade thermalizes pre-existing matter to temperatures reaching the QCD scale, around 1.7 × 10¹² K, with compressed hotspots approaching the electroweak scale near 10¹⁵ K (P23), and the cascade terminates before one second (P40). That is twelve to thirteen orders of magnitude below the GUT temperature: the unified-symmetry phase transition never occurs in our patch's history, the Kibble mechanism never fires, and the monopole abundance is zero by thermal bookkeeping rather than by dilution. There is nothing to clean up because nothing was spilled, and inflation loses its third job the way it lost the first two, to an origin event that never visits the regimes that manufacture the problems.
The deeper economy is worth stating plainly: ΛCDM's singular origin obligates the model to every consequence of every energy scale on the way down, monopoles among them, while SCT's collision origin only ever reaches the energies heavy-ion physics already studies in the laboratory (the same QCD regime, at larger volume). The null result that embarrasses the standard package is, for the cascade, the trivially expected one. The thermal ceiling and cascade termination are established in Paper 1, From Chaos to Convergent Foundations (P23, P40), with the BBN-anchored termination constraints carried through Paper 3, From Chaos To Concordance Spectra.
The cleanest kill in the catalog: a single confirmed magnetic monopole detection would certify a GUT-scale epoch, falsify the cascade's thermal ceiling outright, and resurrect the standard package, prediction, janitor, and all. Short of detection, confirmed proton decay at GUT-predicted rates would establish unification physics whose cosmological absence SCT would then owe an explanation for.