To be fair, it uses the full blob until you pack, which is not immediately and depends on your settings. Large repositories spend a significant amount of effort

To be fair, it uses the full blob until you pack, which is not immediately and depends on your settings. Large repositories spend a significant amount of effort determining optimum window pack sizes etc to optimise the packing of their history. So, git can be quite heavy on disk usage, until all the loose objects are packed.