I don't mind the general sluggishness of the system that much (as I love the platform in general) but when you can't get your work (nor hobbies) done because of tools breaking, it gets really annoying really fast.
I always assumed that the publicly hosted version of gitlab is basically a giant demo version of the enterprise edition you buy to host it yourself. Hell, you can even host the community edition for free.
If your work relies on it, why rely on a free online product?
EDIT: TIL gitlab.com also has a paid options. I stand corrected.
We have a hosted Gitlab at 2 of my clients. Both are up.
Some orgs are paying 99$ per user-month for the SaaS version of gitlab.com, they probably rely on it pretty heavily :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20191119174637/https://about.git...
Edit: others made the same point, but I'll leave this here for the link to the pricing page.
We're not using the free product, we're paying customers (using the hosted saas version of the product).
Yes, the issues, MR, reviews are not available, but honestly I wouldn't want to be in a job where I could not get by without it for several hours.