alt Hacker NewsIsn't that why most people are on GitHub in the first place ? Which then, Windows style eventually turns into people wanting to use GitHub also for company work, where the real money comes from for GitHub.
Without free CI in GitHub, you might as well say:
"they can just shut the whole thing down and this reliability issue will be solved immediately"
Maybe it is, but I know that lots of us used GitHub way before Actions launched. I think even if Actions wasn't free, GitHub would still have a massive advantage because it is the most well known place to host code, especially by less technical users (which is where I see a lot of finger pointing going with the increase in GitHub usage).
I would not be surprised if a serious amount of this usage is not user-intended and instead the LLM just inserts some sort of CI job off the bat and people roll with it.