Yes. You can selectively disable services instead of the whole project. Google provides an example where VMs are selectively disabled while storage remains enabled when costs exceed the budget. Basically, you have the flexibility to create a cloud function to meet your requirements. Disabling billing on a project was simply one of the Google examples. I agree it can be too much for some environments.

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#selectively_control_usage