You're naive if you think those don't affect small shops.
If you want to do enterprise software, even as a small shop, things like requiring pull request approvals is an absolute must.
Our customers demand it.
Doesn't matter how many employees we have, or how profitable we are. If we want to sell software to most large CPG companies, this stuff is non-negotiable.
So I just use GitHub.
The workflow I like in Gitlab is protected branches. This lets you go fast on a dev trunk then pull changes over intentionally.