Right. Sure I agree with that. You have to do a lot more yourself. I just don't think it's that big a deal though but that's probably just me. Someone running Perforce has probably set that up themselves, and so they vaguely know what they're doing. So if they care about CI/CD they probably have the ability to set it up themselves. Personally I've used CruiseControl.NET, Jenkins, Buildbot, and custom in-house software and the first three support Perforce out of the box. I also don't mind the classic Swarm UI (I don't like the new UI) although I admit I do prefer the GitHub and GitLab UI!

There is the old adage that every bit of friction increases the chance something won't be done.

Swarm feels like a minimal effort to me and just isn't as frictionless as GitHub. Id rather have Swarm than not, but it's not great.