I actually never encountered the problem with the crashing daemon, but we also have periodic restarts (they don't take too long and can be scheduled to happen at night).

Upgrades aren't automated but as the server is only exposed to the internal network (and also not fully exposed there), the attack surface is much lower. Keeping servers up to date isn't hard, and we don't always insist on running the newest Gitlab version. We make sure to upgrade if there's a very critical bug or if we lag too far behind.

It's true, upgrades for Gitlab could be smoother, but we've never had significant down time from it. And while others might say it destracts from day to day work, I (and some others) find it a welcome break from coding.