The external developer who started the work and was highly praised by Gitlab offered to work for them if they made a team around federation --> nothing.
A group of French universities are now considering making a group in order to work on it themselves and contribute back to Gitlab.
Gitlab will most likely use it as a big selling point once all the work has been done by externals with little to no cost to Gitlab.
I encourage you to actually read the link before making such a statement.
Anti Commercial-AI license
GitLab, Inc is a business and it’s not run by idiots. If federation was going to make them a bunch of money, they’d put a team on it. Relying on an outside group to execute your business goals is terrible management. It’s clear federation is not one of their business goals.