Not my experience at all, in a similarly sized premium on-prem GitLab. I git-push and the pipeline is running faster than I can get to my browser. Jobs queue basically instantly assuming you have enough runners for your workloads.

I have no experience with using the search. On both GL and GH I prefer to just pull the code and search with my preferred local tools.

Personally I find GitLab CI syntax better to work with than GitHub, particularly if using dependency-based versus using stage-based workflow.