Look at BMW's heated seat subscription, those who want them are subsidising the cost of fitting the unused parts for those who don't. But if that cost is low enough relative to their income, they don't care.
It would cost Tinder next to nothing to give everyone unlimited super-likes, but they make a lot more money charging for them than they would charging everyone a flat fee (network effect++ / ladies' night for the 21st century).
I'm not sure I like where all this will end up but - GitLab are hardly the worst offenders.
I hear you about "not the actual cost," but in software engineering -- to say nothing of SaaS offerings -- pinning down the actual cost per byte served or committed is incredibly hard
Maybe GitLab is trying to see how much they can tighten the thumb screws before LONG STANDING advocates like me jump ship, and I'm sure the switching cost of a lot of their customers makes it akin to ransom, but for others they have deep enough pockets that they'd eat the switching cost out of spite and those fish may be big enough to swing their stock price the other way
If one thinks of the money GitLab is being paid as compensation for domain expertise, then accepting community implementations sounds fine. Someone took the time to implement a feature they found valuable, distributed under the MIT license, and GitLab didn't have to spend sprint points on implementing it, only on reviewing it for applicability across the supported use cases, congratulations: free code
A reasonable counter-argument would be that GitLab needs ongoing money to do ongoing ownership over any such contributed feature, but that's true of every one of their MRs, enterprise feature or not
Almost nothing on this list screams "domain expertise" to me: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ultimate/#wu-ultimate-featu... and the fact they mention "lock discussions" as an Ultimate tier but https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/discussions/#prevent-comment... says "All tiers" makes this conversation super hard to have in good faith