I thought that the GitHub degrading would be an opportunity for them to be an alternative more focused in stability and a customer centric approach . But it's just more slop

Investors actually want slop-branded AI on everything right now, so it checks out for companies to maximize for it. We are so fucked.

Why would they want to become the target for free users vibe coded slopware? I don’t think many of them are converting to paying customers.

They don't need to be.

GitHub is already the main platform for random open-source projects, and that's unlikely to change any time soon. GitLab's selling point is essentially "Github, but not by Github". They would do Just Fine offering a highly-restricted free account for the handful of hobbyists who care enough about leaving GH but don't care enough to go to Forgejo & friends and for the people doing evaluations, offering free credits to the few high-profile FLOSS projects who accidentally end up on GL-the-SaaS instead of self-hosted GL, and for the rest just focusing on paid corporate customers.

They could easily impose usage limits for such no cost users, which disable abusive usage.