I've been using Gitlab free for all my personal projects and mostly I'm totally okay with this change. I was afraid of being forced to pay for some basic functionality in a year but honestly most bronze/silver features are for slightly bigger projects than personal.

Just one small thing: pretty much the only 2 features I use from the Bronze plan are Issue Weight (I can live without them) and Milestones. I would like to see Milestones in the Free plan because for me it is just a convenience to create more structure in my issues. I wouldn't pay for just that feature and the alternative is more labels which would have the same result but more messy.