What I understood is that the author is not happy about the “Open Core” model and would prefer truly OSS, but the real deal breaker is maintaining Gitlab.

My experience self hosting Gitlab was pretty terrible, it requires a lot of attention on your part, and internally the project feels like a bunch of fragile scripts.

There’s also little documentation for when things go wrong, with was almost every single update.

In the end I switched to Gitea as well and I’ve been happy with it for years at this point.