> Sounds good on paper, but in reality you still need to pay the insane licensing fees if you need a usable product.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? I ran a hosted Gitlab instance for a previous company for years with SSO, actions, container registry, on Gitlab CE. I never felt like I was missing anything.

While I'd definitely reach for Gitea if I wanted to be a purist about open source I honestly can't think of a Gitea feature that's not in Gitlab CE.