Solution 2 is going to be more expensive, there is a cost to creating a workflow. A workflow is a sling job that needs to be created and then trigger the creation of a workflow instance within the oak repository. This in itself is a lot more expensive then doing a conditional check. 

I would agree with @arunpatidar , I would use only 1 workflow. Workflows are independent threads that do not know of each other's existence. This causes issues in Oak at times (especially when two of them run at the same time and operate on the same paload).  That being said, you could try to use an...

If you can move your 25 GB of assets to one of the following locations such as S3/Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage then you can use asset ingestion that comes OOTB with AEMaaCS and ingest your assets on any environment. You would then use your bucket as the source of truth, and update an a...

I can validate that after installing Forms Fix Pack https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-release-information/aem-release-updates/forms-updates/aem-forms-releases.html?lang=en the issue has been resolved. Make sure to update your EAR files redeploy and update the CRX repository ...

I had the same issue it was caused by a custom repoinit script that was deployed under crx-quickstart/launchpad/config/org/apache/sling/jcr/repoinit that was causing the repository service to fail on start. Most likely the activate function is runnig the repoinit scripts and silently dying.  Best th...