Require manual trigger (always) for the "Upgrade status" job
#3572380 will help a lot, since that's where most of the action is. But we've also got RUN_JOB_UPGRADE_STATUS. I'm seeing contrib maintainers put this in their default .gitlab-ci.yml files. This is absurd.
I'm (grudgingly) okay putting #3572380 behind an flag, so that it doesn't immediately happen all at once, and folks could revert to the current, wasteful behavior if they really insist.
But for RUN_JOB_UPGRADE_STATUS I can't fathom any scenario where running that repeatedly is a good idea. It should always be when: manual.