I agree that github actions has a horrible syntax and can do much less than travis, appveyor, circle, ... I'd really have to resort to yaml references to do anything elegant. But yaml references aren't elegant at all. But it still is free and vastly outperforms the other free CI's.

I just converted our old parrot travis runners to github actions. There I had constant troubles with travis timeouts of 15m 10 years ago. With the new github actions I can run the full tests (which was not possible with travis) in 3 minutes. About 8x faster hardware.