Any time I see engineering time spent on splitting/sharding test suites, I can't help but wonder if access to a single beefier runner (e.g. 64+ cpus) would have alleviated all that work. Also always find the duplicated setup time a bit wasteful on resources.
Basically yeah. At my last company we switch from n GitHub runners to 2 128 core epyc boxes and massively (20x?) decreased our build times. A surprising thing is how much time is spent on IO to upload and restore the cache between steps that’s saved if the entire job runs on a single machine