Sure... and yet I would happily spend an entire day learning about git to avoid 30 minutes cleaning: the premise that time is fungible is simply incorrect.
(Regardless: this "30 minutes" is of course an estimate, and isn't "30 minutes longer". I do demos in college classes on how to set up personal git servers--given your existing ssh and web server setup--with nothing more than a git init --bare and renaming a single default hook, and so setting up GitLab to me is definitely going to take way more time as it probably is going to require learning some new config file format and figuring out if it has some kind of database dependency and the such. But the reality is that time is NOT fungible so GitLab might be worth setting up no matter how hard it is vs. using git as intended.)
(Regardless: this "30 minutes" is of course an estimate, and isn't "30 minutes longer". I do demos in college classes on how to set up personal git servers--given your existing ssh and web server setup--with nothing more than a git init --bare and renaming a single default hook, and so setting up GitLab to me is definitely going to take way more time as it probably is going to require learning some new config file format and figuring out if it has some kind of database dependency and the such. But the reality is that time is NOT fungible so GitLab might be worth setting up no matter how hard it is vs. using git as intended.)