They did it better. I’ve never met anyone who has used both GitLab CI and GitHub Actions and thought they were remotely equivalent.

To be fair to GitHub, "GitHub" Actions is just Azure DevOps Pipelines wearing a mask. Which I think explains a lot about it's quality as a feature. It was brought in as a rushed copy-paste of the existing Azure DevOps feature very quickly post acquisition.

I have to regularly use Azure DevOps and the whole platform is painful, and now is rotting on the vine. I hear there is internal strife at Microsoft between Azure DevOps and GitHub products.

Agreed about the GitLab CI. Far surperior than GitHub Actions.

Gitlab CI actually came befor Github Actions, but both were heavily influenced by Travis CI.