I used Gerrit for over a year at one company and I have to agree. Every minor change required amending a commit and another review. It really breaks a lot of the git process.

I also had to admin a Gerrit server once and the documentation (at the time at least) for setting up and running a Gerrit server was total shit. It was a painful process to say the least.

Another project, which took many of my old team members, started using Gitlab instead and they loved it. The merge requests made a lot more sense. I'm currently at a new company that uses Gitlab and I have to agree.

Both systems are pretty much suggestive. We could always +1 a code review ourselves if it had to get out that day, but it's best someone else did it and there was a record. Gitlab is a lot more lose. There's no official field for an approval, but you can put in a nice little thumbs up emoji in your comment, and you have the same audit trail.

TL;DR +1 Gitlab (et al.) over Gerrit for sure