Well, that's why the word "official" is in there. Obviously you could mock up the entire github actions scaffolding locally and have it inject environment variables and support all the actions and everything, but keeping that up to date will be a nightmare if you're doing it on your own.

Obviously you could put the whole CI/CD into a bash script and not use any features or functionality provided by github actions but there are plenty of nice things that it does and it would be a shame to not use any of them.

I didn't mention it in my reply but I was referring to the complaint in the article that the author wants to be able to debug locally without having to push changes to GitHub first. The top comment by MoreQARespect and others highlight the benefits of scripting as much as possible so that processes like builds and cutting releases can be run and tested locally.

> Obviously you could mock up the entire github actions scaffolding locally

Not sure if anyone's advocating for implementing GA entirely. You can at least automate project-specific bits as much as possible using scripts, and then have the CI environment use the same automation. That allows for more local debugging than overusing GA.