Thank you! It was a bit of culture shock for me when I first experienced it, coming from the world of business software, and I figured others would find it equally fascinating to learn more about.
Everything is so easy when your entire source repo is a paltry few hundred megs and you can build everything from source in a few minutes. It feels like flying.
When I went back to Perforce I was reminded of why that was a thing. You're making a full copy of everything. They recently introduced a virtual copy stream, but I remember people advising against using it, for reasons I can no longer remember. It seemed like a potentially sensible approach.