[philihp]

Running actions triggered from a non-main branch does it for me, either on pushes to the branch, or 'workflow_dispatch'. You'll otherwise never get that level of fidelity to what happens in production.

Keep the logic in your YAML "dumb". Avoid variables and subroutines in the file, if you want to DRY something, create your own custom action. You can have unit tests on an action, you can't have unit tests on a GHA workflow.