Any more details about the offline patch/upgrade process? When I looked at gitlab years ago, it handled that fine but the documentation seemed "nervous" about it.
I struggle to think why that would be any drama, unless the setup is trying to use "bare" gitlab (e.g. running the puppet commands manually versus $(docker save -o airgapped_gitlab.tar gitlab/gitlab-ce:18.2.0-ce && cp ./*.tar /dev/disk/usb-whatever/goodluck/))