Honestly, everything about GH actions/AzDO pipelines is infuriating. The poor tooling with poor write-time assertions are just so frustrating.

Give me a proper platform that I can run locally on my development machine.

but, if those anchors are a blessed standard YAML feature that YAML tools will provide real assertions about unlike the ${{}} stuff that basically you're doing a commit-push-run-wait-without any proper debug tools besides prints?

Then yes, they should use them.