The price rises feel somewhat different now, on reflection.
If so, that does suggest this is a bit too big of a hammer and perhaps they should add that cloning is also sufficient to keep the project alive.
With package managers that pull directly from online repositories, it's also possible to have a repository of something small and stable that has no activity other than being cloned often.
I realize that I probably have the ability to get a free premium Gitlab account as an academic, but one of the reasons I ended up using Github instead was that Github's process for that was very simple and almost instant, whereas Gitlab's was frustrating and had weirdly pushy salespeople involved to the point that I abandoned the process.