It's all useful information. Who knows, maybe cheap tires are more failure prone, but in this particular instance, I'm inclined to believe that the punctures caused the resulting failure. The wheel had been a bit lumpy for a few weeks, but I had been thinking more in terms of the truth of the wheel, and inspected the spokes but not the tire.

A new tire of the same type, that I already had on hand, is on the bike, with the old liner. Going forward, I could just keep re-using the liner in an endless succession of cheap tires, or ditch the liner and get a puncture resistant tire for a better ride (so I imagine). I'll probably have 4 - 5 years to figure that out, meanwhile, other projects beckon.