Pin the action's version via a digest and use Renovate for updates.
You can run all your CI locally if you don't embed your logic into the workflows, just use CI for orchestation. Use an env manager(Mise, Nix etc) to install tooling(you'll get consistency across your team & with CI) and call out to a task runner(scripts, Make, Task etc).
> You can run all your CI locally
if you can, you don't need CI. we can't (too slow, needs an audit trail)