IIUC the issue here is the depth option - they're telling it to only fetch the last 50 commits, but they were fetching the last 50 commits from EACH branch. In

IIUC the issue here is the depth option - they're telling it to only fetch the last 50 commits, but they were fetching the last 50 commits from EACH branch. In other words, they were fetching all commits that are within 50 commits of any branch head. By restricting the branches, they drastically reduce the set of commits to fetch.