My sentiments exactly. Sure, on paper they offer capabilities to "replace" other 3p tooling, but you can't replace fully fleshed-out products with half-baked features. Take Jira for example. Gitlab markets itself as having "comprehensive" (the highest kind) comparability to Jira's team planning, portfolio management, and service desk capabilities.

I would be interested in knowing how Gitlab handles some of the functionality my team relies on every day with regard to task management:

Does Gitlab have an automation engine that can trigger a set of user-defined rules based on events like issue creation, comments, transitions, etc etc?

Does Gitlab allow users to define custom issue and request types, custom fields, custom validations, custom screens and workflows?

Can I link issues in Gitlab? Can I create issue-type hierarchies?