What’s hilarious about that? Seems like a pretty simple way to do it. Especially for a file that isn’t going to be downloaded enough to require a real CDN.
It's just funny because they're removing it from a source code repo, packaging it up into a zip, and adding it to another source code repo. If they didn't mind including the change history they could've just published the code as-is as a clone. If they did want to strip the change history they could've published it as a shallow clone or an artifact. But instead they chose to push a ZIP file into a repo with a single branch. I guess at least they'll have a history of their ZIP files.
They do have it. They used to publish it. Then someone found a vulnerability in a commit of theirs (6e42e3b1eca73c306db1580719a3a1bfb715f6d8 if you're interested in looking it up in a mirror), exploited it, and took all data Gab ever had.
This current approach is just a deliberate obfuscation in an attempt for it not to repeat. By just providing a zip you can't really look at their changes on top of Mastodon with git log, you have to put in slightly more effort.