The main problem with actions is the way they advertise its usage "just put workflows together" is a horrible and non-debuggable way to do things. But even in the tech itself, caching is pretty stingy which can slow dev builds for fairly simple projects because every run will repeat some common work unless you have the cache perfectly configured (did u cover npm, docker, etc. with cache keys correctly?)

Looking at these flaws, running workflows from a persistent VM of ur own becomes pretty tempting because you don't need to copy caches around and can easily SSH in.