> you are trying to describe a program in a data structure
This describes 100% of software development, though! Programming is just designing data structures that represent some computation. Each language lends itself better to some computations than to others (and some, like YAML, are terrible for describing any kind of computation at all), but they're all just data structures describing programs.
The problem isn't that GitHub Actions tries to describe a program in a data structure, the problem is that the language that they chose to represent those programs (YAML and the meta language on top) is ill-suited to the task.
This describes 100% of software development, though! Programming is just designing data structures that represent some computation. Each language lends itself better to some computations than to others (and some, like YAML, are terrible for describing any kind of computation at all), but they're all just data structures describing programs.
The problem isn't that GitHub Actions tries to describe a program in a data structure, the problem is that the language that they chose to represent those programs (YAML and the meta language on top) is ill-suited to the task.