Comment by palata

I think it made CI management more accessible.

Before that, most people would avoid Jenkins and probably never try Buildbot (because devs typically don't want to spend any time learning tools). Devs would require "devops" to do the CI stuff. Again, mostly because they couldn't be arsed to make it themselves, but also because it required setting up a machine (do you self-host, do you use a VPS?).

Then came tools like Travis or CircleCI, which made it more accessible. "Just write some kind of script and we run it on our machines". Many devs started using that.

And then came GitHub Actions, which were a lot better than Travis and CircleCI: faster, more machines, and free (for open source projects at least). I was happy to move everything there.

But as soon as something becomes more accessible, you get people who had never done it before. They can't say "it enables me to do it, so it's better than me relying on a devops team before" or "well it's better than my experience with Travis". They will just complain because it's not perfect.

And for the OP's defense, I do agree that not being able to SSH into a machine after the build fails is very frustrating.