The slow loading of the community pictures in the background of the gitlab landing page (about.gitlab.com) gives the impression that it's very slow even if the relevant content on the page loads much faster. At this point Gitlab has a reputation for being slow so fighting this has to also be done at the perception level; not only ttfb level.

Yeah, a few folks mentioned the hosted version is fine. However, I am not interested in hosting my own instance. That's said, I don't mind paying a small monthly fee if it means getting a faster cloud service on less crowded servers.

In that case https://githost.io/ might be interesting for you. private managed instance of gitlab.