I've been, very slowly, working on a small self hosting setup. I tried Gitea and Gogs but they both felt heavy. I'm currently running cgit and gitolite but cgit is too simple for my taste and while gitolite can be customized to do ci/cd with hooks it's a bit much. This looks like it's potentially right in that middle ground between Gitea/Gogs/Gitlab and cgit+gitolite.
It does seem to be entirely lacking documentation though which is a bit rough.
Forgejo is great and has a lot of exciting development going on in the community. The https://forgefriends.org/ community is working on bringing federation into Forgejo via the F3 specification which I find particularly cool. I'm hoping to bring federated features into Ayllu as well once the project matures.
The middle ground you describe is what I'm trying to do with Ayllu. w.r.t. Gitolite currently Ayllu requires SSH access and I'm planning to write a shim that works the same way.
Sorry about the documentation, unfortunately I haven't had the time to write some yet but it's on my list.
Gitea have worked like a wonder for my purposes, even when running it on a Raspberry PI (although the raspberry server was for a small group of 3 developers at most). It was still very responsive and didn't feel heavy at all.
I use “heavy” in this context more to mean in terms of features not the process size. Gitea for example expects users to have accounts. In contrast a gitolite “user” is just a public key associated to a name in a config file.
Honestly if I ever expect for this to be genuinely useful I know I should just use Gitea, but I’m still torn between being practical and having fun.
It does seem to be entirely lacking documentation though which is a bit rough.