> Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product.

This is a real problem for acquiring customers. CI/CD / Actions in general has a low initial perceived value and a high perceived value after use while being primarily a commodity product (serverless compute). To acquire customers they need to offer a free tier, to make money they need to charge their heavy users more, but because it is a commodity their heavy users will self-host runners or jump ship.

Action minutes is a really good proxy for value gain from cloud git services, where repo count, user count, file count/size, etc isn't.

Its a fun pricing puzzle.