I remember it used to say it is just for testing and repos can be deleted at any time, but that message is gone now.
Does that mean it’s like GitLab and we can use it for real development now?
You might have been confused with try.gitea.io, which is the online site for testing and general playground; repositories there are only kept for a while and deleted at the owners’ discretion. The software Gitea (which is not a service) is production-ready since long ago and it’s current version is 1.9.
As far as I understand, all development on for example Gitea has been moved to Gitea.com (reference Gitea issue #1029), and I believe I have read statements akin to it being more or less good to go.
That said, I think someone more involved in the development should confirm this. Gitea.com is different from try.gitea.io either way, in that it is now a stable deployment where users and repos aren’t deleted out of nowhere.
As said before, Gitea is production ready and being used around the world. The movement from Github to gitea.com doesn’t have anything to do with that. You can check this thread to know the reasons behind that movement.