Beware, #devops geekery lies ahead! Look away unless you're into that sort of thing.
I decided to give the #terraform backend feature of #gitlab a try over the weekend though I'm using it for OpenTofu. Generally I use the storage at Dreamhost for backend state since it behaves like an s3 bucket, though more recently I've started using the object storage at Linode since I get it for free with my job.
The actual integration was pretty easy though not having used http for backend state before it took a couple of commits to get it working. Looking at the documentation it's dead simple if you use one of the pre-built Terraform or OpenTofu Gitlab templates but I have a centralized template I use for my pipelines and I opted to build Tofu support into that instead of using the Gitlab-provided one.
The lack of support for Terraform Workspaces will likely keep me from using it heavily, but I do see a great use case for leveraging this backend state for bootstrapping a new cloud environment. Normally when I'm setting up a greenfield Cloud account I have to bootstrap the backend state by running with local state and then migrating it into the object solution once it's setup. The benefit of this would be that I could have remote backend state the entire time and not need to migrate.
Overall it's pretty good. I think if support were added at some point down the road for Workspaces, that might make me look at shifting to using this instead of object storage. If you don't have access to an object storage though then this was perfectly fine and it being accessible even with a free Gitlab plan is pretty nice.