The strength of gitlab has always been their runner setup. Arm likely want to use this to run runners on any hardware platform, unrestricted.

I'm still a strong gitlab supporter but tbh their development backlog is overflowing for the last 4 years at least. They have a TON of work to do and they seem to be focusing dev resources on what major clients want, instead of making the whole platform more robust. It's sad for us simple open source free tier users.