>Where CloudBees/Jenkins has faltered is in its instability, mainly due to the thousands of third-party plugins it supports and the maintenance headaches they cause.
This is true, but also a bit disingenuous.
The Jenkins plugins ecosystem is indeed a bit like an app store: the quality varies a lot. There is stuff that is not maintained, stuff that has security bugs, stuff that is just trivial jokes (https://plugins.jenkins.io/chucknorris) and so on. But there are also hundreds of useful plugins to integrate with everything under the sun.
GitLab "fixes" that problem by having fewer features and integrations, so it's a bit disingenuous to say it's purely a negative point for Jenkins.
That being said, it is also true that you don't need to have everything that much integrated into Jenkins. It would make sense to better separate the job scheduling from the reporting, artifacts, etc. But it's not really an argument Gitlab can use since they're going that way too and want to provide an integrated environment.
