What would be the problem with gitlab.com/index.html username? There's no rule that a web server must serve up index.html from some /public/ folder just because that's the URL. This screams poor engineering to me.
I am in complete agreement with this statement. Unless they're running on an ancient LAMP stack or something the web server isn't going to do anything with the .html extension (or any other extension), and browsers are supposed to look at mime type.
