Of course! The point is that it is a non-starter to operate this way but git doesn't hold your hand to do the right thing here. Everyone probably lands on approximately similar solutions with varying degrees of sophistication (which is something that could probably be improved in the ecosystem!) and even those common patterns stopped working for us as the repo continued to grow.
I think you also expand on that later, but that paragraph just gave me pause because it essentially says that if you hold it as wrong as possible, then bad things will happen. It's a bit like presenting an alternative to relational databases by pointing out that schemas with no indexes lead to hour long queries. I'm not interested in the hypothetical worst-case of the old system, I am interested in your average traffic and storage overhead when using it with a common caching setup.
I do accept the argument that a distributed architecture has inherent costs which can be managed better using a client-server architecture because you don't have to replicate state across all nodes. I have worked with both git and Perforce and see the appeal of both.
