I set an s-maxage of at least a minute. Keeps my servers from being hugged to death while not having to invalidate manually.

It does not for me. I was under the impression it only hides ads. I'm using ublock origin on mobile but still see the cookie notice.

Make sure you have the "annoyances" filter lists enabled in the uBlock settings. Or really - make sure you have every filter list enabled except for the languages you don't use in the languages section.

We have a small development team (20) but 100+ clients that have reporter role.

We are in the process of moving out some clients so we could use Starter. Premium was too expensive because reporters count as a user and guests are only free in Ultimate.

So now we are looking for alternatives, which sucks because as a developer I really liked Gitlab.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

There is a feature that lets non users report issues via email which might be usable. It would prevent them participating in more advanced issue tracking and seeing other users issues though.

We tried it but it didn't work out for us.

You don't know what your issue description was after you send an issue through service desk. You just get a generic reply that starts as the email-chain.

The issue templating doesn't work obviously, the quality of created issues drop.

Depends on your requirements to be honest. I’ve used gitea in the past and was very happy with it.