ad hominem isn't a very convincing argument, and as someone who also enjoys forgejo it doesn't make me feel good to see as the justification for another recommender.
I personally use Gitea, so I'd appreciate some additional information.
Forgejo became a hard fork in 2024, with both projects diverging. If you're using it for local hosting I don't personally see much of a difference between them, although that may change as the two projects evolve.
I'd had a gitea instance before and it was appealing insofar as having the ability to mirror from or to a public repo, it had docker container registry capability, it ties into oauth, etc; I'm sure gitlab has much/all of that too, but forgejo's tiny, tiny footprint was very appealing for my resource-constrained selfhosted environment.