I am a GitLab contributor. I have been fighting for years for them to explain why basic features were getting shoehorned into paid tiers. This is years too late, and it falls short of addressing the source of the issue. The people who are making these decisions seem to have an incentive to restrict features to paid tiers. It's a business, I get it, but they are taking basic features that the community could implement, and locking them away in a paid tier. Sometimes a front-end only change, all the data is already available, marked as a paid feature. I used to constantly come across features I needed that had landed in a paid tier where I could write a grease monkey script to do it in a few lines of code, so I would post it as a snippet to illustrate how ridiculous it was.
First of all, thanks for being a GitLab contributor. Could you share other features you're concerned about? (If you have a link to issues that'd be great)