I've resorted to running my own local copy of GL (and, of course, its runner) for troubleshooting build complexity, since their runner pool has been so indescribably bad of late: https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c083...

I agree with the other comments that CircleCI is my high-bar for "how can a sane person run the build locally?" because I also agree with the other comments that "act" is handy, but only for the most trivial of hello-world builds, and `gitlab-runner exec` is a cruel joke