exactly my experience. Assuming that a powerful enough server is available to do that. Our first attempt to run gitlab on some small cheap VPS (2 cores, 4 gigs of ram) was a total disaster.
We support 30 developers on 10gb ram and 4 cores. That said, we are probably a year and a half behind version wise and only use it for its SCM capabilities.
We are running it on a 2vCore, 8GB RAM vm. Works good for our ~10 concurrent users on peak. The ~120CI builds per day are running on other hosts though.
quad core with 16 gigs of ram for a team of 4 people. Most likely 8gb of ram would be sufficient for us but the risk of decreasing our productivity is not worth the insignificant difference in price of 8GB vs 16GB VPS monthly fee.