What is the policy on "works in progress"?

For as long as I've been active as an IMDb contributor and participant on this message board and its predecessors, the IMDb policy has been that a screening at a film festival does count as a release, so if a film is shown at a festival in a particular year, the year in parentheses after the title can't be any later than the year of the festival screening.

However, I've learned in another discussion here that if a screening is designated as a "work in progress", it might not count as a release. For example, the film '77 is shown with (2022) after the title, even though it started having screenings as early as 2007 -- 15 years before the year after the title. All the pre-2022 screenings are identified as "work in progress", although I don't know if that's really true. For example, the Hamptons International Film Festival 2008 catalog (see https://www.digitallongisland.org/record/30691?ln=en#?xywh=-1064%2C-99%2C4579%2C1944&cv=79 on p. 83) identifies '77 as a world premiere, with no mention of it being a work in progress.

I can't help but wonder if the past screenings might have been retroactively declared to be "work in progress" screenings so as to get a later year in parentheses after the title. (See https://web.archive.org/web/20090530141325/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0326716/releaseinfo/ for evidence -- this 2009 version of the film's release info does not have "work in progress" as an attribute for the 2008 Hamptons screening.)

The reason I ask about this now is that another thread on this board has to do with a different film which also has prior-year "work in progress" screenings -- and the producer is trying to have those screenings disregarded for "year after the title" purposes so that the film will have (2023) in parentheses after the title.

So my questions are:

1. If a screening is a "work in progress", does it count or not count as a release for purposes of the year in parentheses after the title?
2. Is it permissible for a filmmaker to retroactively declare a screening to have been a "work in progress" for IMDb's year-after-the-title purposes?

Regardless of the answer to #1, I certainly hope that the answer to #2 is "no". Otherwise, a filmmaker could make a trivial edit to add or delete a couple of seconds of footage and claim that the prior screening had not been the final version of the film, just a "work in progress".