I tend to have most of my workflows setup as scripts that can run locally in a _scripts diorectory, I've also started to lean on Deno if I need anything more complex than I'm comfortable with in bash (even bash in windows) or powershell, since it executes .ts directly and can refer directly to modules/repos without a separate install step.

This may also leverage docker (compose) to build/run different services depending on the stage of action. Sometimes also creating "builder" containers that will have a mount point for src and output to build and output the project in different OSes, etc. Docker + QEMU allows for some nice cross-compile options.

The less I rely on Github Actions environment the happier I am... the main points of use are checkout, deno runtime, release please and uploading assets in a release.

It sucks that the process is less connected and slow, but ensuring as much as reasonable can run locally goes a very long way.