A lot of the pain of GitHub Actions gets much better using tools like action-tmate: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

As soon as I need more than two tries to get some workflow working, I set up a tmate session and debug things using a proper remote shell. It doesn't solve all the pain points, but it makes things a lot better.

Tmate is not available anymore, and will be fully decommissioned[0]. Use upterm[1] and action-upterm[2] instead.

Honestly, this should be built into GitHub Actions.

[0] https://github.com/tmate-io/tmate/issues/322

[1] https://upterm.dev/

[2] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debug-with-ssh