The fix already existed and was neglected for a decade. It was a 3 lines of bash code. The big would commonly make a runner hang forever unnoticed, on a platform that charged by the minute. One minute hanging, was one minute charged. The fix that would drop considerably the amount of total minutes charged was immediately followed by charging self hosted runners by the minute.

>GitHub incentive was to make it fast.

They charge by the minute. The faster it completes the action, less money. Runner go fast pocket go low