That's an interesting perspective, and I can't strongly disprove it, but that doesn't match my impression. I cloned both repos (Gitea's from GitHub; Forgejo's from Codeberg, which runs on Forgejo) and ran this command:

  git log --since="1 year ago" --format="%an" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | wc -l

to get an overview of things. That showed 153 people (including a small handful of bots) contributing to Gitea, and 232 people (and a couple bots) contributing to Forgejo. There are some dupes in each list, showing separate accounts for "John Doe" and "johndoe", that kind of thing, but the numbers look small and similar to me so I think they can be safely ignored.

And it looks to me like Forgejo is using a similar process of combining lots of smaller PR commits into a single merge commit. The wide majority of its commits since last June or so seem to be 1-commit-per-PR. Changing the above command to `--since="2024-07-1"` reduces the number of unique contributors to 136 for Gitea, 217 for Forgejo. It also shows 1228 commits for Gitea and 3039 for Forgejo, and I do think that's a legitimately apples-to-apples comparison.

If we brute force it and run

  git log --since="1 year ago" | rg '\(\#\d{4,5}\)' | wc -l

to match lines that mention a PR (like "Simplify review UI (#31062)" or "Remove `title` from email heads (#3810)"), then I'm seeing 1256 PR-like Gitea commits and 2181 Forgejo commits.

And finally, their respective activity pages (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pulse/monthly and https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/activity/monthly) show a similar story.

I'm not an expert in methodology here, but from my initial poking around, it would seem to me that Forgejo has a lot more activity and variety of contributors than Gitea does.