I know gitea is extremely lightweight. I used to host Gitlab years ago and it took way more resources. It seems like hosting it is more geared toward enterprises than individuals/very small teams.

Because it runs on the lowest vps you can imagine, GitLab is way overkill for personal projects.

Gitea is simple to package and run, so I just install a single package and enable a systemd service.

Gitlab is really designed to run on kubernetes, and while there's plenty of self hosters willing to run overkill infra locally, has proved to be enough of a pain for enough people to run that it limited its growth in that space.