Things like this are the reason why companies like GitHub then put everything under a paid tier.
But the reason I created this was because Actions always worked so well for me, and it seemed to have so many possibilities to build things on it.
Regarding the Global Free Tier, every GH account comes with Actions Minutes and this is way to have a nice CLI to put them to use toward your building, and maybe have a spot for agents to do some work you don't want locally.
Bigger picture, I feel GH led the way providing this idea of "compute as utility" (free compute for even free GH accounts, was amazing - but I really think that the future is shaped like that). I'm serious about that: AI will eventually become cheaper to train and infer, and the oversupply of compute will be a background layer we will have access to much cheaper. Just one of the trends. So the idea of the Global Free Tier or Background Compute as a universal utility, is something I think si really real.
Also probably important to note that the reliability issues GH seems to have faced, are more of a recent uptick, but Actions has had this free tier for ages.
It's quite irresponsible of them to have almost all the core features free and a paid tier would significantly reduce abuse of it (and especially GitHub Actions) like this.
If they don't, then don't be surprised to see more outages on their platform.