If folks just had actions target make or bash scripts instead of turning actions into bash scripts none of this would be an issue. Your CI/CD and your devs should all use the same targets/commands like `make release`.

I'm actually confused and scared on how often this isn't the case? What are people doing in their actions that isn't easily doable locally?

It's the cloud. Runners are ephemeral (pretend, but still) with no persistent storage. This makes you either rebuild everything in every release stage (bad) or put artifacts in s3 or whatever (also bad) - this is especially painful for intermediate artifacts like dependency bundle caches etc.

As much as I like make it just doesn't work with the typical cloud stateless by default configs. If it works for you, your project is small enough and try to keep it this way.

> with no persistent storage

There's https://github.com/actions/cache though?