My experience is the opposite. Gitlab has a lot of features but they are all half-baked. Ever time I try out a feature, I feel like I get bit for doing so.

A couple of cases

- At first child pipelines couldn't access artifacts from the parent job. Now you can opt-in to it but nothing enforces sequencing

- Some features only work with "needs" (getting parent pipeline artifacts) while others only work without it (depending on an entire stage)

- When a job you "needs" doesn't exist, instead of having a sane behavior (e.g. skip yourself), the pipeline errors. Correctly propagating and maintaining all of the rules correctly in a moderately complex pipeline is ... difficult.