GitHub Action not evaluating correctly

So this is a weird one... I am trying to implement a CODEFREEZE option in release pipelines so I can implement a global freeze to any release with an organization secret:

name: test code freeze

on:
  push:
  
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      CODEFREEZE: ${{ secrets.CODEFREEZE }}
    steps:
      - name: test
        if: ${{ env.CODEFREEZE }} == "true"
        run: echo "code is frozen"
      
      - name: test unfreeze
        if: ${{ env.CODEFREEZE }} == "false"
        run: echo "code is NOT frozen"

For some reason, both of these run. I've tried setting the secret to a number of different values. I've tried using quotes and not using quotes, but nothing I do seems to have an effect. Am I missing something extremely obvious?

This does appear to work but I don't understand why:

name: test code freeze

on:
  push:
  
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: test
        env:
          CODEFREEZE: ${{ secrets.CODEFREEZE }}
        if: ${{ env.CODEFREEZE == 'true' }}
        run: echo "code is frozen"
      
      - name: test unfreeze
        env:
          CODEFREEZE: ${{ secrets.CODEFREEZE }}
        if: ${{ env.CODEFREEZE == 'false' }}
        run: echo "code is NOT frozen"

This also appears to work:

name: test code freeze

on:
  push:

env:
  CODEFREEZE: ${{ secrets.CODEFREEZE }}

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: test
        if: ${{ env.CODEFREEZE == 'true' }}
        run: echo "code is frozen"
      
      - name: test unfreeze
        if: ${{ env.CODEFREEZE == 'false' }}
        run: echo "code is NOT frozen"

so the problem only exists when you set the env on the job level

Solution

Nevermind... I clearly have not had enough coffee... I found the syntax error:

name: test code freeze

on:
  push:
  
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      CODEFREEZE: ${{ secrets.CODEFREEZE }}
    steps:
      - name: test
        if: ${{ env.CODEFREEZE == 'true' }}
        run: echo "code is frozen"
      
      - name: test unfreeze
        if: ${{ env.CODEFREEZE == 'false' }}
        run: echo "code is NOT frozen"

It requires single quotes in the evaluation and the eval has to be inside the curly braces...