Goto file 'gf' with leading slash

Trying to open a file with ‘gf’ that happens to have a leading slash and does not seem to prepend the forrect path to open the file. Trying this in lua as well as vimscript (lots of my older code is still in vimscript).

Example of line:

$thing: /file/top/open.yml

Full path could be in $HOME/dev/repo/open.yml

Adding the path with `set path+=" does not seem to do the trick, and tried includeexpr but that did not work either.