I've seen numerous "escape hatches" over the years that actually just turned out to be painted on the wall. If you actually tried to use them. No one ever does though.
I don't think its malice. I just think its pretty uncommon for anyone to intentionally back out of a structural tech decision so it gets forgotten about and remains un-battle tested.. That or the timeline is longer than SaaS has been around.
Yes, it is easier said than done. At my company we use buildkite and many people wrote scripts that simply fail outside of buildkite.
GitHub actions is even worse, it seems like it was designed from the ground up to create lock in.
Nix helps a bit on the bootstrapping and dependency management problem, but won't save you from writing a script that is too tightly coupled to its runtime environment.
I don't think its malice. I just think its pretty uncommon for anyone to intentionally back out of a structural tech decision so it gets forgotten about and remains un-battle tested.. That or the timeline is longer than SaaS has been around.