The old Gerrit Trigger plugin provided a way to filter certain commits to trigger a build. 

This is much useful for monorepos, that have entire repositories as subfolders of it.

I know that single-repos approach is better, and also git submodules, but there are some cases that isn't there a way to run away from it. 

I found a plugin that prevents the build from occurring by filtering a set of files or path: https://plugins.jenkins.io/multibranch-build-strategy-extension

However this isn't the desired approach, the desired approach would be the changes not matching the folder doesn't get even discovered at all (I mean, not shown in Jenkins UI).