This is very shady. If there were plans to introduce a certain feature in their proprietary code base, then it should have been raised much earlier in the PR so people don't spend time and energy developing this. Further, "already merged a version of this code into the private gitea repo" euh, hello licensing?

Gitea was already controversial in the sense - why leave a perfectly good closed source solution (GitHub) to another closed solution?

I think, for anyone seriously into self-hosting their source codes - https://forgejo.org is the way forward.