For me, running Gitlab locally is extremely heavy (webpack especially). How beefy is your computer, as a Gitlab developer?
Funny that you mention Webpack, I am part of the webpack working group and we are trying to improve developer experience:
https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/working-grou...
We were able to reduce memory consumption quite a bit, but we are working on different other improvements.
Small world :)