> That said, I wish we hadn't migrated to GH, our self-hosted instance had WAY less downtime despite being perhaps a bit slower (mgmt saving money) and required a bit more toil

The key thing that drove our decision to self host gitlab was that WE were the ones in control of when things happened. We didn't do upgrades during times where we really needed our git infra up, and we were in control of our response time to incidents. We were not at the mercy of some other company's upgrade schedule and incident resolution process.

Of course, it comes with added workload and responsibility, but as the above comment says, it was not that onerous. While we paid for Gitlab Enterprise for a long time, we eventually switched to the free tier as that company was winding down (for reasons unrelated to our choice of git hosting), and the free tier actually has pretty much everything we needed.