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It is so common to include unreliable narrators in mystery
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Really? I think we're talking about two different things.
People lying and fake witnesses is the norm. But that's a lot different from the author lying. This concept is well represented by Dine second:
2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.
This rule could be paraphrased into a more common rule for every author of every genre:
no scene must ever turn out to be just a lie the author himself made up in order to fool the reader.
This is the very basic of narrative ethic, if you don't accept this you might as well pull deus ex machina and similar.
You can have fake scenes, but it must be very clear that those come from a character inside the story and that they are meant for another character in a story. Or it must be something that a character with a distorted perspective is seeing, and the reader is seeing it through their eyes.
At any rate in the end the reader should be able to tell with certainty what was a lie and what was the truth.
Those stories that break this common rule are usually very poor conceived. One example that I can make is Heavy Rain, where you are able to "listen" to culprit's thoughts that he couldn't conceivably have being him the culprit. A culprit can lie, but there's absolutely no reason for a culprit to lie in his own thoughts. That had no other purpose but the fool the reader.
Umineko is very borderline on the matter. There are scenes that you simply can't tell if they were true or not.
For example the whole story of Ange of 1998 in EP4. Was it real?
If we accept the events of EP8 as canon then all of that simply didn't happen. Unless it was a parellel universe, which existence however has never been confirmed nor explained inside Umineko.
So how do you justify that? The only way you can think it wasn't a direct lie from Ryuukishi to the readers is in case it was part of a story that Hachijo wrote.
The problem is that in that case it simply doesn't make any sense. Because there are particulars mentioned that Hachijo simply couldn't know, and if she did Ange should be pretty much freaked out.
Ah btw
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So what? Are you guys saying, "We can't be sure about these scenes, therefore it is impossible to reason about them"? That's a logical fallacy, you can reason about things which you aren't sure. It just means that your conclusions are also not sure.
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Kant would strongly disagree with that.