Gitlab is a monster to host for your own small amount of projects. If I where to start fresh I would go with https://forgejo.org/

I am also a bit worried how gitlab has changed its pricing not so long ago and the clear push to go towards maximum profit regardless if it's users are still getting a good product.

I use GitLab for essentially everything and I haven't noticed anything get worse. It's constantly getting new features and many of them are very enterprise-focused, but they don't make the everyday user's experience worse, you can mostly just ignore them.