I'm pretty happy with codeberg.org as a free host.

Alternatively, Forgejo, Gitea, or (based on praise I've seen from other people) maybe sourcehut.org.

I find GitLab's interface intolerable. Heavy reliance on javascript even for read-only access, nonintuitive organization, common operations hidden behind menus, mystifying icons... Every time I seek out a project's home and discover a GitLab instance, I find myself pausing to reconsider whether contributing to the project will really be rewarding enough to outweigh the unpleasant experience I'm about to have.

What does VCM stand for?

Gitlab interface is busy, yeah. But you it packs a lot of functionality in. If you want, you disable features like wiki and snippets to free up space on the side bar of a project. Or just look past it and find the part you want, issues merge requests, whatever.

After working for years with GitLab professionally, you know exactly where everything is.

Particularly making a contribution should anyhow be trivial - you push the branch and it shows a banner in the repo asking if you want to open a MR for the recently pushed branch.

I don't know why anyone would use GitHub actions. They seem like a weird, less powerful version of the GitLab CI. Now they want to charge for runtime on your own runner.