What's the current state of git tooling for large files and partial clones?
My holy grail implementation would be a "partial clone" that downloads desired files like normal, but creates stubs for selected files that are not stored on the device but downloaded on-demand upon opening them, like the OneDrive Files On-Demand [1] or Google Drive File Stream.
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/save-disk-space-w...
Have you seen https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit? It's used by the Windows team to manage a monorepo containing most Windows source code.
Unfortunately that approach was put in maintenance mode since it didn't seem like it would be supportable on macOS.