This really sucks for bug reporting. I don’t mind this at all for hosting as that cost notable resources (especially their free CI tier) and they can set their own terms, but I want people to be able to report bugs without any trouble. (Although if spam is an issue maybe projects could opt-in to requiring this verification to report bugs).
A work-around is maybe the service desk feature allowing reporting bugs via email but this has issues for proper collaboration:
The reporter’s email is shared.
The issue is private by default.
Can’t collaborate on an existing issue.
Maybe I’ll just go back to mailing lists… Or GitHub has gotten better recently. But GitLab’s CI is so much better.