Purpose of dependencies is unclear

Problem to solve

The documentation describes dependencies in GitLab's CI/CD like this:

dependencies

This feature should be used in conjunction with artifacts and allows you to define the artifacts to pass between different jobs.

Note that artifacts from all previous stages are passed by default.

To use this feature, define dependencies in context of the job and pass a list of all previous jobs from which the artifacts should be downloaded. You can only define jobs from stages that are executed before the current one. An error will be shown if you define jobs from the current stage or next ones. Defining an empty array will skip downloading any artifacts for that job. The status of the previous job is not considered when using dependencies, so if it failed or it is a manual job that was not run, no error occurs.

So, what is the point of dependencies if it only allows you to specify jobs for which the artifacts are already passed in the first placed? Did I miss some edge case?