tldr but: don't use GitHub Actions. Its a mess, the availability is often atrocious, and the UI around it is _still_ as clunky as when they first rolled it out many years ago.
There are better solutions out there.
There are better solutions out there.
I was doing things more than 20 years ago in Hudson that GHA can't do now.
A 1000% yes, because it means the default experice most devs have of CI is using ephemeral runners which is a massive win for security and build rot.
Every company I've worked at with stateful runners was a security incident begging to happen, not to mention builds that would do different things depending on what runner host you got placed on (devs manually installing different versions of things on hosts, etc)
And what are those?
There's also the Woodpecker CI fork, which has a very similar user experience: https://woodpecker-ci.org/
When combined with Docker images, it's quite pleasant to use - you define what environment you want for the CI/CD steps, what configuration/secrets you need and define the steps (which can also just be a collection of scripts that you can run locally if need be), that's it.
Standalone, so you can integrate it with Gogs, Gitea or similar solutions for source control and perhaps a bit simpler than GitLab CI (which I also think is lovely, though maintaining on-prem GitLab isn't quite a nice experience all the time, not that you have to do that).
Anda a lot more flexibility in terms of what can you do.