> given how cloning a remote repo only gives you a partial copy of the remote history
When you clone you get the full remote history and all remote branches (by default). That’s painfully true when you have a repo with large binary blobs (and the reason git-lfs and others exist).
You're right, I got that part wrong, git actually fetches all of the remote commits (but not all of the refs, many things are missing, for instance notes).
But a clone of your clone is not going to work the same way, since remote branches are not cloned by default, either. So it'll only have partial history. This is what I was thinking about.
When you clone you get the full remote history and all remote branches (by default). That’s painfully true when you have a repo with large binary blobs (and the reason git-lfs and others exist).