From Elijah Newren, Mon 16 Mar 2020 at 09:32:45 (-0700) :

quoted

I am interested in more details on how to handle this using replace.

This comment at the conference was in reference to how people rewrite
history to remove the big blobs, but then run into issues because
there are many places outside of git that reference old commit IDs
(wiki pages, old emails, issues/tickets, etc.) that are now broken.

[...]

Interesting, thanks for the context!

As for using replace refs to attempt to alleviate problems without
rewriting history, that's an even bigger can of worms and it doesn't
solve clone/fetch/gc/fsck nor the many other places you highlighted in
your email.

I agreed, but one part that makes it easier in my context is that I don't
need to distribute the replaced references, I just need them for myself.
This alleviate a lot of problems already, and as I outlined in my email the
combination of replace ref and sparse checkout is almost enough.

-- 
Damien Robert
http://www.normalesup.org/~robert/pro