Would a tool like act help here? (https://github.com/nektos/act) I suppose orchestration that is hiding things from different processor architectures could also very well run differently online than offline, but still.
It's generally very helpful - someone else mentioned here the fundamental problem is lack of a tight feedback loop. It doesn't perfectly replicate the GH environment, but for my use case that doesn't matter and it's super nice to have.
I think really what would help is a way to SSH into the machine after it fails. SourceHut allows that, and I find it great.
I haven’t looked into act for some time but I remember it NOT being a direct stand in locally. Like it covered 80% of use cases.
Maybe that has changed.