It does, yes. To add a bit more color though, what happens is that when you run `git gc` (or it's run automatically for you sometimes) an extra compression step

It does, yes. To add a bit more color though, what happens is that when you run `git gc` (or it's run automatically for you sometimes) an extra compression step is done that uses diffs of some sort to avoid storing so many near copies. Packfiles are related to this.