But that history is hardly useful without metadata to tell them what each snapshot contains, at the very least. The only thing they have to go by is the commit

But that history is hardly useful without metadata to tell them what each snapshot contains, at the very least. The only thing they have to go by is the commit date, so they can never know whether a snapshot is stable, what to revert to, etc. At that point you're not much better off from doing manual versioning by compressing the directory, and naming each file `v1`, `v2`, `v3-final-final2`, etc. (: They don't need Git for that.