I thin one big benefit of being able to do this is getting more visibility into the pipeline from the GitHub Actions UI/API (including status checks in PR build

I thin one big benefit of being able to do this is getting more visibility into the pipeline from the GitHub Actions UI/API (including status checks in PR builds). It also helps with reusability. If something is packaged as a GitHub Action, it's much easier to reuse than a shell script written for some other project. GitHub Actions is far from perfect, but I think once you get used to it, it works pretty well.