Woa, thanks for the detailed response, really appreciate it :)

Interesting to hear about Perforce, I never even heard of that before. I wonder what makes it so suitable for AAA. Wondering also what an equivalent for indie devs could be, because Perforce sounds expensive and maybe overkill for smaller studios and solo devs?

As to your points:

Templates for setting up new repos: I think it would be doable to set up Cookiecutter + Cruft in CI, either on hosted runners or your own. For a dedicated instance it could be part of the infra package.

Renovate I will also offer on the paid plans.

For storing Terraform/OpenTofu state, Forgejo hasn’t implemented this on purpose; from what I can gather, the maintainers felt it doesn’t fit a code collaboration tool. The solution here would be to bring your own S3 bucket as the state backend, and run plan and apply from CI. For dedicated instances that could be part of the setup as well.

On the nested org/group structure: Forgejo has a flatter structure than GitLab. Organisations own the repositories, and teams decide who can access which ones.

As for your other ideas and suggestions, I have noted them down. This has been super valuable insight for me, thanks for letting me take a look under the hood!