What about being able to run stuff locally even hints towards me having such an opinion? The processes including tests and release are still automated, the trigger and where they run are different.

Nowhere do I say you shouldn't use CI/CD at all. I just don't like the current CI/CD implementations and the environments/workflows companies I worked for so far provide on top of them.

The regressive thing is putting everything ONLY on a remote machine with limited access and control, taped together by a quirky YAML-based DSL as a programming language and still requiring me to program most stuff myself.