It's not "just a database row," I oversimplified a bit too much perhaps, but it pretty much is very very little in the way of data. Since the following blog post, more stuff has been added to Git (2018, iirc):
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/blob/master/doc/delta_i... https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/-/issues/1519https://github.blog/2015-09-22-counting-objects/
> Very early on we figured out that actually forking people’s repositories was
not sustainable. For instance, there are almost 11,000 forks of Rails
hosted on GitHub: if each one of them were its own copy of the repository, that
would imply an incredible amount of redundant disk space, requiring several
times more fileservers than the ones we have in our infrastructure.
