The fact that Git has an extremely strong preference for storing full and complete history on every machine is a major annoyance! “Except for network IO” is not a valid excuse imho. Cloning the Linux kernel should take only a few seconds. It does not. This is slow and bad.
The mere fact that Git is unable to handle large binary files makes it an unusable tool for literally every project I have ever worked on in my entire career.
git clone --bare --depth=1 https://github.com/torvalds/linux
Takes 21 seconds on my work laptop, indeed a corporate Windows laptop with antivirus installed. Majority of that time is simply network I/O. The cloned repository is 276 MB large.
Actually checking the kernel out takes 90 seconds. This amounts to creating 99195 individual files, totaling 2 GB of data. Expect this to be ~10 times faster on a Linux file system.
So what's your problem?
Git-lfs exists for a while now. Does that fix your issue? Or do you mean that it doesn’t support binary diffs?
Git LFS is a gross hack that results in pain and suffering. Effectively all games use Perforce because Git and GitLFS suck too much. It’s a necessary evil.
Git handles large text files and large directories fairly poorly too.