Workflow automation w/ built in CI/CD, package management and code scanning etc.

The most important bit is workflow automation. It can be triggered on most (all?) events github emits

https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-tri...

It was super obvious the value prop when it was HCL based. YAML based it kind of looks more like 'another CI'. It's still insanely powerful, just not as developer friendly anymore.

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) services. Essentially when you merge a changeset you can configure a specific branch to automatically test, package, deploy, and integration test that branch with no additional human intervention.

So Actions is similar to Jenkins?

minus the infrastructure, maintenance burden, and plugin hell

AWS has that.

that's just a subset of the features you can develop with actions