Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018. Since that Azure DevOps, the service which hosts Azure Pipelines, reduced its rate of features and improvements release. Their feedback community is collecting dust with a variety of highly voted, 5 years-old issues that are still open.
In other words, its an abandoned project that’s in an unannounced maintenance mode.
Functionally speaking, as Uncle Ben once told Peter Parker, with great power there must also come great responsibility. Azure Pipelines offers template mechanisms that allows building pipeline definitions themselves. This allows complex and conditional logic to dynamically change the structure of a pipeline.
Misuse of features is an user rather than tool problem. Yet in practice Azure Pipelines users rely on those build-time templates as the main solution. I’ve seen entire solutions with business logic and toggles developed with such mechanism which are overly complex, slow and cumbersome to deal with.
Programmable CI and CD pipelines and YAML templates are harmful as they lead to a fragmentation in the local tooling vs the pipeline. What’s more, custom tasks rely on the old Visual Studio Team Services model of extensions, which aren’t easy to create or enable.