That's a great point, and I think we all agree that the documentation does a poor job of distinguishing between when the "snapshots" and the "diff" models are i

That's a great point, and I think we all agree that the documentation does a poor job of distinguishing between when the "snapshots" and the "diff" models are in use. But what is never exposed in the docs or user interface is the internal implementation details of how snapshots are stored. And that's what I was arguing is not one of Git's many documentation and UX problems.