My understanding is that on remote execution Task.init is supposed to be a no-op right?

Not really a no-op, it would sync Argpasrer and the like, start background reporting services etc.

This is so odd! literally nothing printed
Can you tell me something about the node "mrl-plswh100:0" ?
is this like a sagemaker node? we have seen things similar where Python threads / subprocesses are not supported and instead of python crashing it just hangs there