That's an interesting perspective. I used to work at a large company with a massive Jenkins setup. The nice thing about Jenkins is that your unix skills translate. It basically just runs a shell script and you can do anything.

In GitHub actions, I feel like I needed to learn a whole new way of thinking, and all the previous skills are mostly useless. I can see a certain part of the build is slow, I know how I'd fix it if I were on Jenkins land, but here it's just too abstracted. I end up just googling and finding someone else with the same problem and copying how they fixed it.

I do agree that gitlab is worse somehow than GitHub actions.