I'm sure legality depends on jurisdiction, too. If you acquired the software legally and you need to keep it running in a VM, I'm sure it's legal at least in some places.

But yeah, just drive-by-downloading MacOS to your Windows box it is probably not quite on the up and up.

Or get one from Hetzner (there's one in the server finder right now for 64/month).

To add to this, they recently published a video showing how they provision and manage their macOS runners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2J2MzKjcqY

Is it really price gouging, or just embodying the real warmup costs of spinning up a job?

I truly don't understand why this isn't more widely discussed (I've seen several "GH Actions Gotchas" articles where this isn't mentioned). Many of the community actions also seem to be designed to run as short jobs to paper around missing features (for ex: https://github.com/dorny/paths-filter ), that end up eating up an enormous amount of your minutes budget.