It's not a lot of trouble. To be fair my GitLab instance isn't setup for large numbers of public contributors. I have a somewhat limited network connection and work on projects that often have large-ish codebases, building Docker images, etc.... and I do 90% of that on my home network (local servers, storage, etc....). So running GitLab locally allows me (and a few other folks) to get all those nice features without relying on the world facing internet connection and without having lots of delays moving large files up and down...
That's the use-case I can understand (if someone has a large number of machines or a fast internal network behind a VPN). My comment was more aimed at public facing projects that are open and accept contributions from anyone.
