My current company also uses GitLab, but the amount of projects we have would be hard to migrate. I don't think we'll be moving anytime soon.

Try running forgejo for your own projects, see what you think of it. Doing the research beforehand helps a ton for your DevOps team.

I don't think Gitlab have ever moved functionality from Community to any paid version, but you should understand carefully if the functions in the paid (and not open) versions of Gitlab would ever come on your radar. It's not unlikely as user numbers and user organisations increase. It'll be exactly at the point switching to eg Forgejo will be painful enough to pay. Switching when still small is easier.