Self hosted gitea for many years with ~25 devs.
Yes, it's essentially a FOSS carbon copy of GitHub. CI/CD is also intercompatible, uses the same syntax and pulls the original GitHub Actions packages.
Now with the Forgejo split, I would prefer Forgejo, as it has way more steam behind it with Codeberg and Blender as the big use-cases.
I'm not OP but probably the licensing drama. Gitea is now open core if I remember correctly. Some details are available here[1]. I also used to run Gitea, but I don't any more. The open-source churn is getting tedious and difficult to keep up with.
I'm a project lead of Gitea, and former elected board member of Codeberg. Gitea remains opensource (feel free to check out the repo and you can see that the license remiains as is), and maintains yearly community elections. The codeberg board was informed a full year prior to their "we just found out blog post", and so "catching the whole community by surprise" is very much not accurate since they very much knew. As well, we (the company) were very public with our activities prior to our blog post announcing things, including working to support other open source projects migrate, and posting about it through various channels (social media, chat, etc..).