So you switched to nothing? That’s not the purpose of github actions or remote ci/cd. Anyone can run tests/builds locally.
I think it comes down to risk tolerance. For an established company that wants to avoid upsetting users at all costs, CI/CD makes sense. But for a nimble 'move fast and break things' startup, it can steal dev time for very little upside.
Say a disaster happens and someone pushes to main without running tests, 9 times out of 10 it will be of ~zero consequence (either the code works first time, it was a cosmetic change that hardly affected users etc).
I know there are horror stories and CI/CD would have prevented some of those, but IME they're just not that common nor severe for small operations, and even when they happen, only a small subset are irreversible/unfixable.
That's not the purpose of a remote CI/CD. Your pipeline can be as strict or as loose as you wish. It's there to show you a log of the execution as it happened in a neutral environment (remote server).
Basically, what you are suggesting is that everyone advertises their tests/builds run on slack? Also when two devs merge their changes, who compile/tests the master branch?
I see the benefit (it avoids the “works on my machine” problem), but my rails app isn’t too fancy and works on heroku ~100% of the time when it works on the dev machine. Making an intermediate build redundant (technically not entirely but it’s just not worth the effort).
For small teams it could be as simple as everyone agreeing to ensure tests pass on main before pushing to prod.