could be useful for the lakeFS monorepo - supports running steps only if certain paths changed: https://github.com/dorny/paths-filter

the main issue as I see it is GitHub branch protection support in these features.

that's where this is valuable. you can still define the workflow as mandatory but if you didnt touch the relevant code, all steps would be skipped, resulting in a successful workflow

For now I prefer to run everything (this is an optimization AFAICS), but one day...