I feel like GitHub's CI/CD offering is too "all-in" now. Once we are at a point where the SCM tool is a superset of AWS circa 2010, we probably need to step back and consider alternatives.

A more ideal approach could be to expose a simple rest API or webhook that allows for the repo owner to integrate external tooling that is better suited for the purpose of enforcing status checks.

I would much rather write CI/CD tooling in something like python or C# than screw around with yaml files and weird shared libraries of actions. You can achieve something approximating this right now, but you would have to do it by way of GH Actions to some extent.

PRs are hardly latency sensitive, so polling a REST API once every 60 seconds seems acceptable to me. This is essentially what we used to do with Jenkins, except we'd just poll the repo head instead of some weird API.