> Are there really editors where adding actions that aren't changes make sense?

Adobe Photoshop is one. Selection changes don't modify the document at all, but they are part of the undo stack. That's because selecting a part of an image isn't as trivial as selecting text.

Sometimes I wish the current selection could be automatically saved in the file too so you could start where you left off if you were halfway through making a complicated selection (I know you can manually save selections, but that's an added step).