My usual impression of GitLab is that it has too many functions I don't ever use, so the things I actually do want (code, issues, PRs, user permissions) are needlessly hidden. What's your workflow that you find GitLab's UX to be nicer than Gitea's?
That was my take too. It is a big project with a lot of functionality. But, I never needed all of that functionality, so it just seemed bloated to me. I switched over to Gitea for self-hosted code repositories (non-public repos behind a firewall) a while back and haven't had any issues thus far.
For instance I just got tripped trying to sign out of my gitea instance since the mobile design has two identical looking avatar + username blocks on top of each other, one being the org switcher the other being a menu (with no indicator) with the sign out button.
I went to a project page, and it auto focused the search input (???), causing a zoom in on mobile.
I just prefer the design / look + feel of gitlab more than gitea/forejo. It's not really a hot take, gitlab has been around a lot longer and has much more support.