Gitea is nice, what CI/CD system do you use with it? I used it in the past with Drone, and Drone left a lot to be desired (coming from/going back to GitHub actions, Drone's job syntax is a bit more complicated and focused on containers).
Drone CI has been working fine for our purposes. I agree that it may not be the most feature-packed thing in the world (for example, caching support is missing completely), but there are lots of plugins and it's easy to write your own.
We've been using exec and ssh runners when containers are not enough (for example, when you need to juggle a few VMs or build some complicated Docker image, and using docker-in-docker is not fun).
