I was just debating if I was going to side step actions altogether for a new build and deployment flow.

I'm at a point where I'm going to set two permanent branches on the remote, one pertaining to each environment. The targets will poll for the latest commit at their configured branch and perform a rebuild internally if a change is detected. Assuming git core ops are still alive, it is possible to keep this running. It's also easy to migrate to a different vendor.

How long have you been writing software? This is pretty much how we did it pre-EC2 except it was SVN + S/CP for the tip of the changes. There is a ton of work around this to build on!