You'd think, especially with the deep VS Code integration, they'd have at least a basic sanity-check locally, even if not running the full pipeline.
To be fair, testing actions with side effects on the wider world is terrifying even if you’re running it locally, maybe more so because your nonstandard local environment may have surprises (e.g. an env var you set then forgot) while the remote environment mostly only has stuff you set/installed explicitly, and you can be sloppier (e.g. accidentally running ./deploy when you wanted to run ./test). That part isn’t a GH Actions problem.
git commit --allow-empty -m "bump ci"
the history problem goes away if you always enforce squash merge...
$ hg init
$ hg commit -m"initial"
nothing changed hg ci -m "empty commit" --config ui.allowemptycommit=1
> yolo = "!git commit --all --amend --no-edit && git push --force #"