In their infinite wisdom brew/services and brew authors have decided to remove the widely referenced brew/services package. The idea being that this is now built into brew itself. In these newer versions of brew they seem to intercept requests for brew/services and return it's installed.

What they failed to realize is that CI machines won't naturally have the latest brew version installed. As a result any package that depends on brew/services fails to build on older brew versions since march 20 (when they emptied and archived https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-services).

The workaround until our base images are updated is to let brew update itself (which pulls in a ton of other updates too), in effect adding millions of wasteful CI minutes globally.