Yeah, I can't edit my first post, but should note that if you don't want to rewrite history of the submodule, it also at least lets you consistently do shallow clones of the submodule - various git-related CI/CD operations on the main repo won't work with shallow clones, so it's a pain if you have to pull in a million old versions of binary dependencies just to run gitversion.

As far as rewriting the history of the submodule goes... that's really something we're okay with - for us, the alternative to the git submobdule was just an SMB share - indefinitely keeping old binary dependencies isn't something we want to do.