alt Hacker NewsNot sure covid was the sole driving force. A combination of MS taking over and deciding to move it to Azure, a massive increase in traffic due to ai usage (not that this should be an excuse for a platform that should be scaleable), and Github going all in on AI usage to write its own code.
They're making it very easy for a viable alternative to pop up and take their lunch - it just wont be Gitlab.
While it annoys me how things have gone downhill, I think you missing one key detail with regards to competition. It's only "very easy" if you feel like throwing enough money at CI compute to power the majority of the open source ecosystems needs. That would be the bare minimum in order to even have a shot of achieving similar levels of network effects as Github.