I think in this case they hate the fact that they cannot easily SSH into the failing VM and debug from there. Like "I have to edit my workflow, push it, wait for it to run and fail, and repeat".

Yep, my company moved onto GH Actions a few years ago and this was probably the single biggest pain point. But also the whole system just feels awkward and annoying to work with. It feels like a classic Microsoft product that would never get traction from a standalone company but because it's part of Microsoft/GitHub and is "good enough" lots of people put up with it.

I had the weirdest thing happen a few days ago.. and only seemed to be happening in the GH runner for a PR.... somehow a function was duplicated in the action runner, and not in local or anwhere else... no idea how the corruption happened... it literally took me hours or pushing minor changes to try to correct the issue... I finally cat'd that file contents out and yep, the function was duplicated... no idea how. Had to create a new branch, copy the changes and then it worked.|

Still no idea what happened or how to ever fix/prevent it again.

One can get the ssh access with self-hosted runners but it is problematic because uncovering secrets becomes trivial.

CircleCI had this exact feature