Hence my idea that we need a means to manage those released files separately.
Ok. Would it be problematic for you if the user-space would be hosted/supported the same way as the project pages will? As in: your personal "site" can be dealt with through pushing to a git repository and the downloads managed through some means I yet need to figure out to deal with large(r) numbers of large files.
This all seems like a very complicated way of hosting static files. I think trying to do something as fundamental as that by forcing it through a huge piece of software like Gitlab is a mistake. Six or eight years from now, Gitlab is going to go out of fashion, the way Trac has. If some people want to use Gitlab generated pages, that is a valuable feature right now, but it is not going to be very future proof.
I use TRAMP and rsync to edit project pages and copy files and would definitely prefer to have plain SSH and SCP. It was a lot easier to transition project pages from HTML4 to XHTML to HTML5 with mobile support than it would have been to move from SourceForge to Trac to GitHub to Gitlab etc. Plain hosting also gives people the option of using their preferred static site generator instead of Gitlab.
Vladimir