I’m pretty sure the whole thing with the Gitlab product was that if you want to have that kind of control, you can host it yourself! And then you can use as much disk space as you want, for the price of disk space! (and management, power and backup)
Until they start pulling features out of the self hosted free tier.
The catch is that you need to host the Community Edition if you don't want to be at the mercy of their arbitrary decision making, which is much harder to find and install, and has far worse documentation/support and limited features.
