The alternative to CI/CD pipelines is to rely on human beings to perform the same repetitive actions the exact same way every single time without any mistakes. You would never convince me to accept that for any non-trivial project.

Especially in an age where you can basically click a menu in GitHub and say "Hey, can I have a CI pipeline please?"

No, the alternative is/was something like "make test" or "build_deploy_and_test.sh".

I think the 2 hours bit was the important part