Thanks! As Zikes say, a little competition is good and gitlab is working out fine for me. I used to be on gitorious and it got bought by gitlab so I moved. I prefer being on a platform I can theoretically port.
Personally, I'm glad to see them using GitLab[1]. While GitHub vs GitLab may make fairly little operational difference for most projects, I do think that competition is sorely needed in the Git hosting space right now.
Maybe he does not want to deal with reviewing shitty PRs and comment noise and feature requests? (As far as I know you still cannot disable PRs).
This is already a large and no doubt time consuming project as it is, and not everybody likes to be a "community manager" more than they like to code.