Dead simple CI - http://deadsimpleci.sparrowhub.io/ could be thought as an extension to any modern CI system - GitHub/Gitea/Gitlab/Forgejo/you name it , adding to default pipeline mechanism (usually based on yaml) the convenient for programmers use of general programming languages, it uses web hooks and commit statues API to report results back to native CI
It uses yaml only for configuration part, but pipeline itself is far more then that . Not sure what do you mean by “middle ground”, could you please elaborate? Thanks