Least cost Path for the concept of a plan for a Canal crossing the Musandam Peninsula (UAE and Oman)

Given current global affairs, I decided it would be fun to calculate a Least Cost Path that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz while I teach myself QGIS. In GIS, a least-cost path assigns a 'cost' to each pixel in a raster and computes the path with the lowest cost using a pathfinding algorithm such as [...]