Step 3 is where I've seen my org completely fall on its face.
Yes, the golden path is "fully supported" yet after a year or two the company executive swoop in and say "why are we spending so much money on the golden path" and slowly, but surely, the support for is whittled away into nothing until the golden path is out of date and actively punishing anyone that chose to use it.
For example, one of our golden paths was a UX framework built on top of standard web tech for the time. The team maintaining that framework is no more and it's now very far out of date. Adopting it means you are pulling in Angular circa 2016 and that you'll be dealing with incompatibilities between that and any new web component you want to start using.
Yes, the golden path is "fully supported" yet after a year or two the company executive swoop in and say "why are we spending so much money on the golden path" and slowly, but surely, the support for is whittled away into nothing until the golden path is out of date and actively punishing anyone that chose to use it.
For example, one of our golden paths was a UX framework built on top of standard web tech for the time. The team maintaining that framework is no more and it's now very far out of date. Adopting it means you are pulling in Angular circa 2016 and that you'll be dealing with incompatibilities between that and any new web component you want to start using.