Say I, as a senior engineer, scan a junior’s MR and see a serious security issue. In GH I can request changes, and then re-verify prior to merge that the issue has been fixed correctly. With GL, the author, thinking they fixed it, can resolve the comment and merge.
In any case, setting unresolved threads as blocking is just a safeguard layer. The scenario you describe is a routine encounter for me. Really sounds like the technical control you want is required approval(s)...of course, GitLab sales recognized that's what enterprise managers also highly value, so it's bucketed as a pay-to-play Premium/Ultimate feature.
> of course, GitLab sales recognized that's what enterprise managers also highly value, so it's bucketed as a pay-to-play Premium/Ultimate feature.
And this is my number one complaint with GitLab. There's no way to pay $4/mo for the basics. If you want required approvals you have to pay for their whole CI system even if your org is already using Jenkins, and for their issue tracker even if you're using Jira. They're all or nothing, and most organizations don't want all.
This is why I say that the only people they're trying to appeal to are enterprise purchasers who like the idea of paying for an all-in-one "solution", not frontline developers who recognize that bundling isn't always better and just want to have a decent system for managing their code reviews. GitLab isn't that: not only is their code review system still missing features that people rely on in GitHub, the ones it does have are gated behind a subscription whose cheapest pricing manages to be more expensive than GitHub's most expensive tier.
Even more adversarial, why not just exploit the implied race condition of your process by having a new PR submitted for another maintainer to merge before you get a chance to block it?
If we're still in fact talking about a scenario involving a group of maintainers with equal authority over a protected branch, all I see is the inescapably human dilemma of collaborative communication and network of trust.
But if one "maintainer" has the asymmetric capacity to immutably block all others, then the goalposts have moved and we're not really talking about just maintainers with equal pull.
On an opinionated note, if there's anything I learned about embracing Microsoft, it's that you can't judge true TCO by merely comparing superficial sticker prices.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-...