That's actually what we did for our monorepo. We had a huge Gitlab pipeline of multiple steps and jobs, now it's a single job pipeline that builds, tests and deploys 15 different projects, all powered by Nix and some Python scripts.

Ugh, yes, but then I fall into the "too complex for bash, too simple for Python" trap. I feel like everything goes to hell the moment someone writes a Python class to deal with /something/ in a build pipeline. For bash, well, we all know where that goes... the other options are simply too obscure for me to invest in.

But I agree with your assessment, as much as the classic

script:

  - chmod +x pipeline.sh

  - ./pipeline.sh

makes me want to die.