I’ve seen many teams get stuck when they rely too heavily on GitHub Actions’ magic. The key issue is how tightly your build logic and config become tied to one CI tool. If the declarative YAML gets too big and tries to handle complex branching or monorepos, it devolves into a maintenance headache—especially when you can’t test it locally and must push blind changes just to see what happens.

A healthier workflow is to keep all the logic (build, test, deploy) in portable scripts and let the CI only orchestrate each script as a single step. It’s easier to troubleshoot, possible to run everything on a dev machine, and simpler if you ever migrate away from GitHub.

For monorepos, required checks are maddening. This should be a first-class feature where CI can dynamically mark which checks apply on a PR, then require only those. Otherwise, you do hacky “no-op” jobs or you force your entire pipeline to run every time.

In short, GitHub Actions can be powerful for smaller codebases or straightforward pipelines, but if your repo is big and you want advanced control, it starts to feel like you’re fighting the tool. If there’s no sign that GitHub wants to address these issues, it’s totally reasonable to look elsewhere or build your own thin orchestration on top of more flexible CI runners.