> I would respectfully suggest that the author is misusing CI. If you have trouble running your tests locally, you have a problem.

I would respectfully suggest that you misread the author. The issue isn't running tests locally, it's running the CI config locally.

I experienced the same problem with gitlab CI years ago, where, basically, you can lint the file and not much more. Past that, you need to run it through your CI and debug if you get slightly different results compared to running a script locally.