Comment by firesteelrain

GP has a valid point. We had a Git repo managed in BitBucket that was gigantic because it contained binary files and the team didn’t know about LFS and storing them in an external tool like Artifactory. So checkouts took forever and even with shallow clones it took forever. With a CI/CD system running constantly and tests needing constant full coverage and hundreds of developers well it eats into developers time. We can’t just prune all the branches well because of compliance rules.

So we ended up removing all the binary artifacts before cloning into a new repo then making the old repo as read only.

Microsoft seemed to want to mirror everything rather than keep source depot alive.

We had another case where we had a subversion system that went out of security compliance that we simply ported to our git systems and abandoned it.

So my guess is they wanted everything to look the same and not just importing the code.