Revert "Fix ci and benchmarks (#581)"

[ianconsolata]

This reverts commit 6c6c640.

[parkan]

force-pushing rebased version as that's cleaner than fixing in merge commit, conflicts were due to a stray import and what looked to be a failed rerere (table clearing code that was added twice)

[parkan]

ugh ok I am going to take a slightly more surgical approach here

[parkan]

• for docgen: fix db init #552 is the simplest fix, though thinking about whether we want the docs generated in CI or locally is worthwhile
• for the other failing db issues... complex orchestration here is just going to be an ongoing nightmare to debug and maintain, giving Experimental test workflow with devcontainer #585 another go because it's honestly a lot easier to manage (and is isomorphic with local dev workflow)
• for the handful of useful changes in the originally reverted PR, I'm looking to see if it makes sense to re-apply them separately or exclude from this revert PR, leaning towards the former

[parkan]

@ianconsolata let's just merge this, I have a clean CI workflow pretty much ready in #585 but it's a bit tricky to develop without this merged

there are other commits we may want to revert on develop but I don't want to just throw away the whole branch given that a bunch of work is based on it; I think it'll be easier to do surgical reverts as needed