Yes — there is a clean, officially recommended pattern in LDP/Lakeflow, and it avoids all the “feels weird” hacks like CROSS JOIN, WHERE EXISTS, or artificial filters.

The correct pattern is:

Use a PRIVATE MV for the validation step + reference it (lightly) in the downstream MV

This creates a gating dependency without changing query semantics.

It is the Lakeflow equivalent of dbt tests gating downstream models.