Not every CI/CD tool is general purpose. I operate a small SaaS that runs on laravel. I have an incredibly simple CI/CD pipeline with static analysis and tests in GitHub Actions (one small workflow file) and Laravel Forge + Digital Ocean for infrastructure management and automated deployments from master. It took 5 minutes to set up and works perfectly

Alternatively, learn how CI/CD works and have a comprehensive tool in your toolbox basically forever

I'm not saying never learn CI/CD tooling, I'm saying don't use it until you need it. In an enterprise setting, yes it's probably a good idea to use such tools from day 1 because you don't ever want to be solely responsible for committing and shipping a bug. In other contexts, like the author's one-man website, the cost is not worth it.

You can't really say that without knowing the author's skills and how much they lose in opportunity costs to deploy manually.

If the author has already deployed 100-200 times and knows enough to set up a basic build, it would be close to break-even with a fairly wide margin.

Are there any CI/CD tools that are likely to stand the test of time in the same way the basic unix ones have?

I'm not against making things easier. But I feel like it's so easy to over-engineer and rely on proprietary crapware.

Is there a conservative path forward here?

Well, our Jenkins jobs still work decade after. Jenkins itself requires some care and feeding tho, mostly upgrades, especially if you use some plugins.

Then again jenkins job can be as simple as "download a repo and run some code in it" without anything fancy so even if SHTF you can migrate away relatively painlessly

No, they are all horrible monstrosities. The ones that are hosted by others (github actions) are still monstrosities, only that other people are taming the monsters.

The best way I've found is to keep the CI/CD tools as just simple task runners. They should only have to figure out when to run things, inject the necessary environment(and secrets), and figure out dependencies (if applicable) and run those. Whatever they run, you should be able to run the same scripts from your own laptop or a similar.

Alternatively

https://docs.dagger.io/1200/local-dev/ https://docs.drone.io/cli/drone-exec/ https://github.com/nektos/act

Jenkins/Travis are getting to this point, not that they are the "cutting edge" or anything. I'd personally rely on projects like woodpecker/drone/dagger so that there's no real "rely" on anything closed source or proprietary.