The publishing pipeline in Sitecore XM Cloud performs several tasks to ensure an accurate snapshot of content is available for publishing from the Content Management instance. These tasks include calculating additional entities to publish, calculating dependencies, and resolving dependencies. These steps are crucial for maintaining the integrity and consistency of the published content.
References:The Sitecore XM Cloud documentation outlines the publishing pipeline process, which includes the calculation and resolution of entities and dependencies as part of creating a publishing manifest1.

According to the Sitecore XM Cloud Documentation for Developers1, the scope property is used to control the depth of the serialization tree.The scope property can have one of the following values2:
Self- only the item itself is serialized, not its descendants.
Children- the item and its immediate children are serialized, not the grandchildren or further descendants.
Subtree- the item and all its descendants are serialized, regardless of the depth.
To limit the serialization of items under a Navigation item to just the item itself and then one step below, the developer should add the scope property with the value Children to the includes section of the serialization configuration file.For example3:
includes:
-name:Navigation
path:/sitecore/content/MySite/Navigation
scope:Children
2:The YAML serialization format | Sitecore Documentation3:The XM Cloud build configuration | Sitecore Documentation1:XM Cloud Documentation for Developers - Sitecore