Agreed. YAML is not a great format to begin with, but using it for anything slightly more sophisticated (looking at you Ansible, k8s, etc.) is an exercise in frustration.

I really enjoyed working with the Earthfile format[1] used for Earthly CI, which unfortunately seems like a dead end now. It's a mix of Dockerfile and Makefile, which made it made very familiar to read and write. Best of all, it allowed running the pipeline locally exactly as it would run remotely, which made development and troubleshooting so much easier. The fact GH Actions doesn't have something equivalent is awful UX[2].

Honestly, I wish the industry hadn't settled on GitHub and GH Actions. We need better tooling and better stewards of open source than a giant corporation who has historically been hostile to open source.

[1]: https://earthly.dev/earthfile

[2]: Yes, I'm aware of `act`, but I've had nothing but issues with it.