This is such an important distinction. The push to make everything a pure Agentic Loop ignores how expensive and slow it gets to have an LLM reason through every single step. I got so tired of the latency that I started building a visual tool (Selonate) based exactly on this Workflow Pipeline concept, using deterministic browser automation for the fast/repeatable steps, and only calling the AI surgically when a selector breaks or data needs unstructured extraction. Really well written piece!