I tend to do manual bootstrapping with local execution as well but when using Forgejo/Gitea and corresponding actions you could also init the repo, start building your pipeline and use act to run it (locally at first if course) and as soon as you have your infrastructure in place you could continue to use the same pipeline there?

Still not ideal/perfect but if you don’t want to depend on some SaaS then this at least already runs the automation as it will be later?

Isn't this what bootstrapping is for? Manually set up the system to the point it can be taken over by ci/cd

my 2 cents here, though I don't understand all the context, you might take a look at sparky - which is lightweight task runner with web console, so you may throw a bunch of jobs into it to do all the "bootstrapping" so that you may later repeat the same if required on any fresh environment ...