The pattern's value is precision: instead of choosing between watching everything (which does not scale) and trusting everything (which is not governance), you name the exact moments where human judgment is required and make the system stop there.
Implementation quality varies enormously. Asking the model to "wait for approval" is etiquette, not a mechanism. A real implementation makes the pause structural: the process cannot continue until the approval is recorded, and the record shows a verified human gave it.
The pattern also sets up graduated autonomy: a new workflow can start with a gate before every consequential action, and you remove gates as the process earns trust, one decision at a time.