i wonder how much traffic can be avoided by pushing for bandwidth-considering updates to the git client itself.

things such as shallow clone by default, applying lazy evaluations on repo with large commit volume (e.g. partial remote-related operations at branch level until it is switched to), etc.

if reading these overloaded graphs is the problem, most readers (nowadays through automated consumption) only care about the current snapshot of a project's code. that too in probably the main branch.

github can probably make the git maintainers implement this. feels like it is worth trying at least.