is this solution considered a hack or is something that we can use as an approved workaround in scenarios where we need to manually trigger validations?

:global just feels like a hack for a feature that should already be there.

strange syntax that subjectively looks hacky to me, but would be a part of the framework

This works, but… it's super hacky. I don't really understand the intent of the abstractions in webpack-chain, and looking through the code of existing modules makes me think every module is currently inventing its own hacks to work around some fundamental limitations here.