I've always found things like AWS codebuild or even just a self hosted bare bones jenkins server far easier to work with. What is the advantage that github actions provide that people put up with it? The feedback seems almost universally negative.

> What is the advantage that github actions provide that people put up with it?

It's the default CI system on github and you get relatively free compute.

It is overwhelmingly less resource-intensive to maintain over time than any Jenkins server. And the config is in the repo (not the Jenkins server's config).

Being free or practically free for many use cases. Especially if you consider multi-CPU builds.