Agreed. I worked with Gitlab CI on the daily from 2021 till 2024 and I started curating a diary of bugs and surprising behavior I encountered in Gitlab.
No matter what I did, every time I touched our CI pipeline code I could be sure to run into yet another Gitlab bug.
This is also my experience with GitLab CI.
It’s great if you have relatively simple CI. If you have anything slightly more complicated (like multiple child pipelines for a monorepo) you’re going to have a rough time.
Every time I thought I understood GitLab CI, it would fail/behave in non-obvious ways.