Earlier quoted context omitted.
No-one said it was. But the answer of self-hosting is a perfectly valid answer for "Why the love for GitLab?" when one = $0 in licensing, and the other = > $2,500/year in licensing.
so basically, you like it because it's free. doesn't speak well for their business prospects.
GitLab's pricing model won a lot of people when GitHub's was ugly for anyone who wanted private repos (single guy at home with 10+ private repos for things like your dot files, etc? $20+ a month, for what likely amounted to under 1MB of disk space).