1. When the build fails, you can SSH into the machine and debug it from there.
2. You can super easily edit & run the manifest without having to push to a branch at all. That makes it super easy to even try a minimum reproducible example on the remote machine.
Other than that, self-hosting (with Github or preferrably Forgejo) makes it easy to debug on the machine, but then you have to self-host.
As I said, I really like the SourceHut CI.
But I'm happy to contribute (money) to SourceHut, they're doing a good job.
You can use `workflow_job` webhook to be notified of a new job, after that you need to call `generate-jitconfig` API to get a just-in-time configuration token, and then you can start a Github runner in ephemeral mode with the JIT token.
This allows you to orchestrate Docker containers, KVM instances, etc., which are used for a single time, and then destroyed.
There are some open source projects, such as using ephemeral Kubernetes pods with the ephemeral runners.