Gitlab CI ist not skipping a step if pipeline is triggered from the UI with varibles

I have the following gitlab pipeline:

Gitlab CI ist not skipping a step if pipeline is triggered from the UI with varibles

I have the following gitlab pipeline:

How to use variables within !reference tag in gitlab-ci?

as far as I know, you can use the !reference tag for relating to some construct used in a parent template.

gitlab ci workflow rules

The below example from gitlab is working while my code is not working. I am using similar logic. Please suggest.