Most efficient way to make an on-off mask out of a gradient

So I’ve played around with a bunch of different combinations of material nodes to take a gradient and mask some subset into an alpha mask 0 vs 1 for the spots that fit criteria and those that don’t. What is most performant?

Candidates include but probably aren’t limited to:

nested ifs
max and min combo
smooth steps
steps
withinrange

Like I feel like there’s just a quick normal way to do this thing for folks who aren’t self-taught and my stuff is going to look dumb, slow, and convoluted for not using it. So what is it?