We(as in everyone) are in a serious need of a new git server product. Just do git serving, and do it well. Preferably in a way multiple nodes can be run active-active for scaling and reliability. No need for cicd (Jenkins is fine for that, thank you very much).
What are minimum viable features for me? Granular (per branch)
security access. Integration with AD federation and other auth providers(congnito, aws iam) and ability to give AD groups rights.
Web hooks sending and receiving. For example launch a merge request webhook(to lambda via aws api gateway, or to Jenkins). Receive a webhook as merge request approval when some Jenkins job finishes.
There is exactly zero need for your repository system also run cicd jobs. It ends up doing both tasks badly.
You'd like an example of said badness? Ok, how about this: in gitlab enterprise if you create cicd jobs/pipelines there is no way to giving someone an ability to run that pipeline without giving that person ability to push to the repository and submit merge requests. Yes, you can then set it so approval is needed before merge, protecting said pipeline, but why? There has been a ticket on gitlabs own issues page about it for years and it is still not resolved.
But wait, there is more... Gitlab enterprise has no mode of working that let's you have more than one active server at a time so goodbye horizontal scaling.
You want to scale your cicd worker nodes? They want you to use docker mashine(a deprecated product) instead of writing a Plugin like ec2-fleet for Jenkins.
It is obvious gitlab tries to funnel it's enterprise customers into saas.