That's the trade-off between precision/safety and ease of use. Sadly for my "safeguarded" actions that don't change the content when there's no match, you even have to maintain the same regex twice per action.
I've asked in the past if there's a less wordy/complex way to abort an action if the regex does not match, but nothing came of it. So wordy it is I guess.
Both approaches are valid tho. If you're comfortable with using filters, filtering and then using less complex/wordy guess value actions should be faster and easier.
I'm usually too lazy to filter so I overengineer my actions to a point where I can run them on pretty much all tracks (at least of one album at a time) without having to worry about them doing harm. However I still check all results manually.