I know you are trolling but for the sake of educating both you and someone not acquainted with Gitlab, they offer:

* CI/CD * Docker Registry * Testing Pipeline * Self hosting option * I'm sure there's more

So I don't think you are being fair here.

PS: I'm not affiliated in any way with Gitlab, just an user

I'm not sure he's trolling. For the sake of discussion, are the features you mentioned actually "hard technical work" or is it just work that can be done by anyone with some experience in that field? I'm not sure how to define "hard technical work" but I would say that it has more to do with the rarity of people capable of solving a problem rather than the time it takes to solve it. That's not to say Gitlab's work doesn't have value, the only question being if it really falls under the "hard problems" category.

I am definitely not trolling. I'm stating an defensible opinion that happens to be unpopular here.

Arguing that an open-source project is cloning multiple pre-existing projects doesn't make the software any more innovative.

> coding doesn't have much room for professional advancement

Coding is like 30% of a developer's job. And I'm being generous.

There is still enough work in the 1%, but you have to make yourself known.