On second thought, will not do separate jobs, because too much leg work would be required to carry the artifacts between jobs since we rely heavily on docker compose (only hacks can be used with docker save and compose, not worth it)

Looks great, thank you for separating the jobs!
Feel free to go ahead & bring it out of draft status so we can verify both jobs passing correctly.
As a next step, I'd recommend to extend the flow in the following way (i'm going to take care of this after this one merged)

Job tree:

1. Pull containers from registry (cache)
   -> Change? Build change layers & upload containers to registry
2. -> Run Parallel jobs (all pulling from container registry as base):
   - Linter
   - Style check
   - API Doc Gen
   - Unit Tests

On second thought, will not do separate jobs, because too much leg work would be required to carry the artifacts between jobs since we rely heavily on docker compose (only hacks can be used with docker save and compose, not worth it)

in this case, i'll go ahead and implement the tree above which could be the foundation to effectively parallelize the jobs with minimum redundancy.

@ktamas77 Out of draft status. We will likely need to override the Check Requirement since the workflow filename changed or add the old check into this branch to trick the Check Requirement into passing. I believe this check is hanging because GH is presently requiring a check that does not exist in this branch.