Ah ok, so your primary concern is that the actual production environment should be separated from the build environment. Fair enough. It's an orthogonal issue

Ah ok, so your primary concern is that the actual production environment should be separated from the build environment. Fair enough. It's an orthogonal issue w.r.t whether the end user (i.e. the developer) should initiate a deploy by using "git push". Usually this is managed by some kind of CI server than then deploys the artifact. I understand that here the TFA was actually advocating to skip this step. However, in both cases the size of the repository (which you called the index, which btw I'm not sure is the right name; the index in git is the place where you stage changes in preparation for a commit) could be an issue. My question was more like "did you ever encounter any problems due to the size of the git repository at the build server?"