Comment by zdw

I don't think we're necessarily in disagreement - your points about reusing CI code across jobs through templating or composition are well taken.

I'd argue that this also dovetails very nicely with having common, shared invocations - if you can run "make test" in any repo and have it work, that makes CI code reuse even easier.

As for the complexity comments, that complexity has to go somewhere, and you should look for how to best factor the system so it's debuggable. Sometimes this may mean restructuring how your code is factored or deployed or has failure tolerance so it's easier to test, and this should be thought of as an architecture task early on.