I wonder if GitHub actions was a bad idea? Like maybe it's being abused for other kinds of compute besides just builds? And even builds themselves can require a lot of compute. I've only recently had a repo there where I wanted to do builds to make a release (both linux binaries and WASM) and whenever I do that tag and wait a few minutes for those builds to finish I think about all the other projects/repos out there on GitHub doing the same.
I'm really kind of surprised they let us do that - like, why didn't they just have you upload the binaries after building on your local machine?
They let you do it because GitLab was first to let you do that. MS had to match the offering of their most noticeable competitor. They also felt like thay had to one-up them... well, to win the competition.
So, from the sales point of view, Github Actions was, at the minimum, an alright idea. Not brilliant, but quite obvious and expected. From the engineering standpoint, however, this is a disaster on many levels. But, that never stopped Microsoft before. They don't try to win the market by making an objectively better product, their tactics are and always have been to make a product that can claim (with an asterisk) to be able to do a lot of things the customer wanted only to discover afterwards that those promises were phony.
> why didn't they just have you upload the binaries after building on your local machine?
You can do that already with GH Releases. Actions is if you want CI/CD managed by GitHub. And you can also use your own machines via self-hosted runners.
I'm really kind of surprised they let us do that - like, why didn't they just have you upload the binaries after building on your local machine?