Xet's tech is very interesting and I greatly enjoyed their blog posts and other technical writeups[0]
But in the era of frontier models and hardware designed for fast model loading (eg: LLM on a chip) I can't imagine that this is worth so much. There's *a lot* of competition to improve Git LFS.
So while I agree with you that this plays a role I also have to believe that it's to understand model usage by competition and thus stifle it.
git lfs just dumps your bin on s3, and is abandonoware since ms bought github, since github historically hosts on aws s3 and improving it would immediately benefit amazon. gh, the maintainers of it, is the only forge that does not allow clean-up unreachable artifact from the server.
But in the era of frontier models and hardware designed for fast model loading (eg: LLM on a chip) I can't imagine that this is worth so much. There's *a lot* of competition to improve Git LFS.
So while I agree with you that this plays a role I also have to believe that it's to understand model usage by competition and thus stifle it.
[0] - https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/xet/overview