With no courage to voice a concern, it's your problem to be strangled by such limitations or there's actually a valid concern that you're not aware of.

Queue "you don't know me" ;) if I was strangled, I would voice concern very much. But as noted several times, everything is setup so that we never need root. The only thing that was an issue, was docker for about a year (we used chroot before that). That's why I had the sysadmin install podman (no discussion necessary) and why I build a wrapper for super easy usage (which is globally available now).

And please note that getting a CI like env is usually not necessary. I only need that exact env to prebuild things that should run in the CI, e.g. target-specific GCCs. And we can't upgrade the CI because some customers pay good money to have our product run on ancient Linux versions (safety critical industries, once something is certified, you use it a looooong time).