Gitea scales really badly with large repos in my experience. Gitlab works a lot better mostly because you can just throw more hardware at it. This is with a pretty large git repo and a lot of daily commits.
Yeah Gitlab is a pig, but that’s what I meant with you can throw hardware at the problem. I’ve been meaning to check out Codeberg for personal project hosting since it seems to address the shortcomings of gitea
We were on codeberg for a couple years and it was fine.