Had a discussion with a friend about this, me not wanting to set up a more complex solution once because I didn’t feel like learning it but wanted to understand what I’m running - especially what I consider my core infrastructure.

So I ended up using a sub-optimal solution that I understand

Stumbled upon this bit that phrases the concept in a better way:

I would recommend gitea to anyone looking at gitlab and vice versa. These two are very similar. I think that blindly running either of them in a container just because you can is asking for trouble though. Go through the manual instillation and know how to set things up from scratch. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t run it, because you won’t be able to fix it when things go wrong. You want a sysadmin that knows how to set these up and how to manage them, back them up, and fix problems along the way.¹