[jomohke]

And yet the data is ephemeral, so in many cases could be done faster without the "real" block storage guarantees.

Github Actions is pay-per-minute-used, unfortunately, so they may have a negative incentive to speed things up. Unless people become frustrated enough to switch to a non-bundled provider.

[dilyevsky]

Not all the data is ephemeral - stuff like node_modules needs to he cached and if you’re suggesting to use tmpfs then it’s like 50x more cost than fully tricked out cloud ssd which is already ridiculously expensive