They also miss out on the dog fooding aspect. They target enterprise customers who run probably run gitlab on bare metal. By doing the same, you experience what your customers do and have much closer feedback loops on any issues that might especially affect bare metal.

Regarding managed dedicated.. I had very bad experience with rackspace in that regard, which is why we moved AWS. At another job we had our own DC suite but had some company taking care of initial cabling as well as remote hands from the datacenter. If I ever do bare metal again, that's why I would do.