“The most recent clone I did of the repo clocked in at an astonishing 178GB.”
The 1JS repo had 2,500 packages and colleagues in Europe who could not clone it. Git’s packing code compared only the last 16 characters of filenames, so every CHANGELOG got diffed against some other package’s CHANGELOG. Repacking with path-walk in Microsoft’s git fork took it to 5GB. A filename shortcut was eating 125GB.