Well, that was a contrived example. Something more useful would be e.g. enumerating all the HTTP endpoints being depended on, or calculating the maximum resource consumption.

I think our disagreement really boils down to different approaches towards workflow configuration. Static configuration has its place in a system where all the "smartness " can easily fit somewhere else. This is often the case when you are building a workflow that glues many in-house components together, which tend to have uniform behavior and you can easily extend them. On the other hand, if you are working with many heterogeneous components that are clumsy to extend, having a smarter, more dynamic workflow configuration API definitely makes more sense.