also a good demo of branch protection is decap cms' editorial workflow https://decapcms.org/docs/editorial-workflows/

Can you clarify what you mean by branch protection? Providing a specific user story would be helpful for me to wrap my head around what it is that you'd like to be able to do.

I'm referring to github's branch protection feature, which it will often nag to set up if you dont have it set up; you can
commonly use it to prevent pushes directly to master/main branch and force every change to go through pull requests.

About bundling up commits, I want to support triggering GitHub actions from the interface. This would allow you to work on an edit branch, and when you're ready to publish your changes you could click a "Publish" button that would trigger a GitHub Action which could merge the changes from the edit branch to main (for example). As long as you only use main to build the site, this should work, no?

This is an interesting idea. If you do that each user would have to configure some sort of stock 'publish' workflow. I think for a lot of folks who use github with things like Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Azure Static WebApps, etc, most will already have automatic workflows that publish any open pull request (sometimes any open branch), so if you tried to create a github action based thing on top of that you might conflict with a lot of folks existing workflows.

Here's a flow that would work there, IMO:

sequenceDiagram

    participant U as User
    participant P as PagesCMS
    participant G as Github

    U->>P: User updates file 1
    P->>G: PagesCMS creates PR to master
    P->>G: PagesCMS tracks the change to PR
    U->>P: User updates file 2
    P->>G: PagesCMS tracks the change to same open PR
    U->>P: User hits 'Merge Changes'
    P->>G: PagesCMS merges PR to master
    G->>G: Github builds and deploys or Vercel or Netlify etc

I get that, but in what context do you see this applying to Pages CMS? You'd like native support of a workflow whereby editors make changes on branch and submit changes to publishing via a PR against main?