A huge portion of my actions are for things like caching or publishing artifacts, which are unique to actions itself.
Caching, I can mostly understand as unique there. Though, I think I'm living with whatever the default stuff in actions is. Slow for builds that don't happen often, of course, but not so slow that I care.
I'm still not entirely sure why it's the case, but the connection to the package registry is incredibly slow, so downloading all dependencies takes forever.
That is, I am assuming that a CI build is not on the immediate dev loop, such that the person pushing it doesn't have to wait for the build before they prepare a review on it.