noto-fonts Git repo is excessively large

The noto-fonts Git repo (cloned as part of the fonts project) uses over 6 GiB of storage, even though downloading a .zip archive from GitHub of the tree at that commit hash results in an archive that uses less than 40 MiB when decompressed. Is there any reason that it's downloaded via Git rather than a standard HTTPS archive download? The excessively large size is a significant barrier to some users with limited storage capacity and/or network bandwidth.