To me, the primary value propositions are: issues, merge requests, comments on issues and merge requests, related stuff like tags/milestones/etc., and the ability to expose this stuff in a friendly way to project managers who don't use the commandline.
I guess since my team uses a self-hosted instance of GitLab, I'm biased and don't put any value on the social network aspect or the hosting aspect.
You could get these things by running a Phabricator istance - not much reason to pay for GitLab self-hosted version unless you really care about the support aspect and some of tgeir enterprise-focused niche features.
I guess since my team uses a self-hosted instance of GitLab, I'm biased and don't put any value on the social network aspect or the hosting aspect.