As someone who works in small companies, and had to endure developers who were using gitlab as "offsite backup" or I guess "push-based 'does this compile?' work

As someone who works in small companies, and had to endure developers who were using gitlab as "offsite backup" or I guess "push-based 'does this compile?' workflow", please don't do this. CI minutes are rarely free, and for damn sure are not "glucose free". If you can't be bothered to run the local compilation step for your project, that is a wholly different code smell