[danudey]

This is true. Git-LFS can dramatically increase the size of the repository on-disk (e.g. in our GitLab cluster), but dramatically decrease the size of the clone a user must perform to get to work.

Note that this can now be accomplished with Git directly, by using --filter=blob:none when you clone; this will cause Git to basically lazy-load blobs (i.e. file contents) by only downloading blobs from the server when necessary (i.e. when checkout out, when doing a diff, etc).