One of the sources of that problem is that GitHub is pushing all new products on top of Actions, making it load-bearing. A few examples are Dependabot, Pages, and Copilot Reviews. These aren't products that need to run on a CI system. Dependabot worked fine before Actions was a thing. Same with Pages, which ran fine for more than a decade without Actions.

My outsider perspective is that GitHub teams are having to fight for compute, and since Actions can be billed and timed, it has become the default compute layer for everything. But it makes for a terrible experience as an end-user.