Okay, I was playing around with diff options and the dead simplest for me which worked out was simply having a gameManager type script catch pause events, set a simple static variable for that game pause state, and then check for that in your player / camera movement sections. Just don’t move player and camera when game state is paused.
My scenario is simple enough not to mess with all sorts of prefabs, etc.
For my needs I needed my dialogue boxes and menus to continue animating, but not having player/camera movement interfere. This worked out swimmingly and feels like the path of least resistance at this point