In my last workplace, I was responsible for making whatever automation I wanted (others just did everything manually) and I just appended a bunch of bash scripts to the Qt Creator Build and Run commands. It easily worked pretty well.
I guess the fancy systems are again, just to add another layer of abstraction, when everything is running on their containers instead of ours.

I’ve been meaning on spending a morning getting Nektos/ACT running.

I was just going to say I need to find a way to run it all on my system to learn it. If this can do it without actually having to push to GitHub, it would be really good for practice.