Pursue a nofollow link when it delivers value that has nothing to do with ranking equity, and ignore it when ranking equity is the only reason you wanted it. That is the pivot, and it dissolves the lazy claim that nofollow links are useless for SEO. They are not useless, they are useful for a different set of reasons than the one most people are chasing, and naming that set tells you which links to go after.
The non-ranking value is real and often the point. A nofollow link on a high-traffic page sends referral visitors, actual people who click through, who do not care about the link’s attribute. It puts your brand in front of an audience and builds visibility. And a profile made only of dofollow links from places that conveniently pass equity looks engineered, while a natural mix that includes nofollow looks like the link pattern of a real site that people genuinely mention. Worth noting too: Google now treats nofollow as a hint rather than a hard exclusion, meaning it may consider such links rather than ignoring them outright, which is observed and worth confirming against current guidance since this area has shifted.
The ignore case is just as clean. If you are pursuing a nofollow link purely as a transfer of ranking authority, expecting it to lift positions the way a strong dofollow link might, you are paying effort for an outcome it was not built to deliver. Chasing nofollow links as equity is the misread, and that is exactly when to walk away.
So the condition is the value type, not the attribute. Ask what a given nofollow link gives you, and if the answer is traffic, exposure, or a more natural-looking profile, it can be worth real effort, while if the answer is only hoped-for ranking power, it is not.
For your next outreach list, sort prospective nofollow links by whether they would actually send visitors or strengthen your brand presence, pursue those, and drop the ones you only wanted for the link equity they will not reliably provide.