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And one of the root keys in a GitHub action is "on" which will get turned into True by a compliant parser if unquoted

Only if you use a yaml 1.1 parser. Yaml 1.2 changed the behavior of how booleans are parsed, but it's only been 13 years since it was released, so I get why people might not have migrated to it yet.

This sounds like an example of the problem: It's not up to me to migrate, we're using a third party service and I have no idea what version of Yaml Github Action's parser users. I read this guide and can't find a version referenced anywhere:

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-workflows/workflow-...

It refers you to this YAML guide, which itself never mentions what version it's helping you learn:

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/yaml/

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