i think that the idea of actions (actions the concept not actions the product) is a really good way of building CI pipelines…

we all know that shell scripts are rubbish, so building your CI pipeline out in composable steps written in a proper language is much more robust

having those steps maintained by the open source community inside a marketplace is also excellent! you don’t need to manage things like setting up AWS variables, managing refresh tokens, etc: you can use an action just by referencing it, easier than you’d install a package… and those actions can use well-maintained open source libraries to do their jobs

there’s a whole lot more, but all the reasons basically revolve around the fact that the composable units written in a modern language shared with everyone is so, so much better than chaining bash scripts together: even if they can be run inside containers (which GHA can do too)

(also, i’ve found github actions much faster than gitlab ci… not comparing runner speed because obviously that’s highly dependent on what you host it in; just time to pick up jobs and time to start the agent)