Only downside is that if you want to use CI to check wheel buliding you must open a PR or remove the check, but I think that is a reasonable trade off to avoid burning the commute on every push (there is a reason we only do it on PRs in an opt-in basis).

and we might as well backport this to all of our active branches.

you must open a PR or remove the check

Although that wasn't part of the plan, I think that one can push the branch to the matplotlib repo to get that. Since the people with push access are the same that are most likely to do that, I think it should be manageable (although a bit of behavior change as most seems to use their private forks. Personally, I always open a PR anyway as I had not thought about the alternative...).

Btw, it seems like GitHub has disabled workflows on forks by default(?). Some recently cloned repos has a text that says that they are disabled. Makes sense.

GitHub Actions
Workflows aren’t being run on this forked repository
Because this repository contained workflow files when it was forked, we have disabled them from running on this fork. Make sure you understand the configured workflows and their expected usage before enabling Actions on this repository.

Seems to have happened quite recently though.

(Or maybe there is some setting for the main repo? But it seems to correlate with when I forked them, at least a quick check says that.)