Fabric is INCREDIBLY lightweight, they provide the loader and a minimal API, this allows them to be quite agile but by the same token modders must make heavy use of Mixins (coremods) to write their own hooks into the Minecraft code, which is typically not good for stability if done poorly or when many are combined in a single modpack.
Forge on the other hand is a bit of a fat bastard but comes with a ton of utilities and hooks set up with the goal of providing everything a modder needs so they never need to directly modifiy the Minecraft code, essentially Forge tries to do the ugly so modders never have to.