Perhaps we have different it industries…
Durability (from ACID) “guarantees that the effects of transactions that have been committed will survive permanently, even in cases of failures”. Sooo, even a hypervisor’s snapshot should be fine. And in our case – zfs snapshot.
Of course, stopping the database would make it safer. Because the app can have the incorrect transaction use bug. Or the rdbms itself can have a bug which breaks durability.
However, safer is not always a requirement. For example, the “safest” way to back up a workstation is to shut it down and then make a full clone of all its drives. But (I think) nobody is doing that.
Moreover, gitea uses sqlite by default. So it probably can be just copied even in a non-cow filesystem scenario.