In most cases i have experienced this phenomenon is caused by the fact that cloud block devices are garbage compared to your machine
You can apparently bring it down to 5s by suspending instead of creating instances.
In an ideal world, the policy groups imposing these inefficiencies would get billed for the cost of their policies, but I've only ever seen situations where everyone else pays the cost of their incompetence.
On the plus side, I actually get actionable notifications from the stuff, so it’s not purely bad for me.
Github Actions is pay-per-minute-used, unfortunately, so they may have a negative incentive to speed things up. Unless people become frustrated enough to switch to a non-bundled provider.