Task View Override - Lightning Experience (Winter '21?)

There seems to be a change in the way that Lightning Experience Object View Overrides behave, at the very least with Tasks.

It seems like in Winter ’21, Lightning Task View Overrides are now treated as the default Lightning Record Page (LRP) for a task. So if an LRP is not assigned to a record (via LRP Activation), then (AND ONLY THEN) is the view override code run.

This seems to change the behavior of the View Override. Previously it ran for all records regardless of assigned LRP.

I can see how this new way of doing things could be useful in some situations, but
I would like a facility to run some code in lightning experience before the LRP renders.

I currently use an Aura Component that implements the lightning:actionOverride interface to do the view override. This component checks the Task record and decides whether or not to redirect the user to a related record or send the user to the Task view page (with no override). I know that I could potentially expose the component to the availableForRecordHome interface and drop it on every LRP that I care about, but it’s a less than ideal user experience.

So a few questions.

1. Is this analysis correct? Anyone else seeing this, or am I wrong in the way that the Task View Override behaves in Lightning Experience?

2. Is there another feature that I can use to run some code before we render an LRP? or is this just not possible anymore?