I agree with all the points made about GH actions.
I haven't used as many CI systems as the author, but I've used, GH actions, Gitlab CI, CodeBuild, and spent a lot of time with Jenkins.
I've only touched Buildkite briefly 6 years ago, at the time it seemed a little underwhelming.
The CI system I enjoyed the most was TeamCity, sadly I've only used it at one job for about a year, but it felt like something built by a competent team.
I'm curious what people who have used it over a longer time period think of it.
I feel like it should be more popular.
tc is probably the best console runner there is and I agree, it made CI not suck. It is also possible to make it very fast, with a bit of engineering and by hosting it on your own hardware. Unfortunately it’s as legacy as Jenkins today. And in contrast to Jenkins it’s not open source or free, many parts of it, like the scheduler/orchestrator, is not pluggable.
But I don’t know about competent people, reading their release notes always got me thinking ”how can anyone write code where these bugs are even possible?”. But I guess that’s why many companies just write nonsense release notes today, to hide their incompetence ;)
I used TeamCity for a while and it was decent - I'm sure defining pipelines in code must be possible but the company I worked at seemed to have made this impossible with some in-house integration with their version control and release management software.