Geez, where to start.
I mean, … the outages are a big part of it. But those outages also extending to taking out my own hardware (e.g., through bugs like the above consuming resources on my own compute) is just double the pain.
But as a product, it's just bad? Riddled with bugs? In no particular order:
* Artifact APIs will return garbage results during a run. Note that the APIs are separate from the GHA actions for interacting with artifacts, and the latter uses undocumented APIs, presumably b/c the documented APIs are buggy AF.
* needs.… will just return junk data, if you typo.
* Builds of actions are not cached, making them rather slow. Many GH official actions hack around this by pointing the tag/branch (e.g., @v4) at a pre-built artifact.
* The pricing is high, compared to other offerings.
* The interface is just FUBAR: e.g., stdin is a pipe, which will wreak havoc on some commands that change their behavior when piped to. stdout & stderr are pipes, which although GHA ostensibly supports colored output, this basically renders it useless.
* Jobs, steps, actions are conceptual mud. There's a few ideas, like "execute this thing" in there, but its all jumbled up/duplicated. Container settings are configured per-job, so if you want to run some steps in one container, and some in another, but in the same job, you're just going to be left out to dry.
* Secrets are hard to manage, and even harder to not leak.
* The expression language has all sorts of corners, like coerced types and functions with parse-time side-effects!.
That's just a few of the bugs I've encountered.