More likely is that the log streamer takes up some amount of resources and thus running it requires a baseline level of compute. But I doubt they spin up a small runner per-self-hosted runner, most likely some ruby workers (on distributed azure instances) are dedicated purely to streaming self-hosted runner logs to log consumers.

I'm certainly not surprised that they tried to sneak in billing self-hosted runner minutes at some ratio to potentially recoup the costs here.

0: https://docs.github.com/en/[email protected]/admin/mana...