[twelfthnight]

Strongly agree with this. IIRC, in RMarkdown state is treated as a separate cache stored outside the notebook and loaded as needed. You could use something like dvc or gitlfs to manage those cache files, and since the Markdown file is plain text, use regular git to inspect changes to the notebook implementation.

I feel like Jupyter notebooks are the PDFs of data science. They are super useful for displaying results, but bake that data in a super inconvenient way for doing anything but rendering the data to look nice.