Nullable event payloads silently null-coalescing to '' are a real "spooky action at a distance" kind of issue, because something that works perfectly when running and being QA'd on PRs, can silently fall apart if made to also run on the main/develop branch (which is only really monitored if the "build breaks," and thus a silent failure or skip might easily sneak through).
Our codebase indeed has comments like this, without which we'd be totally lost:
# Note contains('') is false if there is no PR at all e.g. on a push to develop,
# so this will always run on pushes to the develop branch.
if: ${{ !contains(github.event.pull_request.labels.*.name, 'ci-skip-backend') }}
I imagine that's true of others as well!