MagicalVagina

On the micro USB connector yes. The usb-c connector is a totally different beast. I have no idea how you are wearing out USBC connectors. They are usually rated for 10,000 plug/unplug cycles.

I’m only using the hosted version, it works. I do have a separate gitlab-runner in GCP at the moment though that is working fine.
If something doesn’t work for you I suggest creating a ticket?

All of what you said seems completely doable to me.

Primarily I want it to comment/annotate changes so peer review focusses on logic and warnings are clear.

You can. See https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/predefined_variables.html

CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE

How the pipeline was triggered. Can be push, web, schedule, api, external, chat, webide, merge_request_event, external_pull_request_event, parent_pipeline, trigger, or pipeline

You have full access to the API and can do whatever you want in the MR too.

I want the ability to specify multiple reusable pipelines, in a central place. This is not possible in cloud.

You can, with CI templates. Templates can be in a completely different repository

Lastly I would like to have multiple potential pipelines in a repository (e.g. smoke test and release).

I do have different pipelines for staging and production in my projects with no issue.

Ah yes this I agree. But it’s not like it’s different on GitHub. I guess I got confused because you said “Advantage of Github over Gitlab is code discoverability.”.
While no it’s the same? There is no advantage for GitHub

It has been mentioned, but this is not a search. It is a way to list all local magazines of an instance. Does not go through the fediverse as far as I know.