It's pretty interesting that Cocoapods got so much flak years ago for basically exploiting Github's bandwidth to host a package registry for the apple ecosystem, and now Github are doing exactly the same as a first class product.
Well part of the (if not THE) reason for that was that they were extremely inefficient in the whole process (complete clones of the master repository including the complete history, although you don't really need that as a cocoapods user).
And it is still inefficient today, considering that an initial pod install takes around 12 minutes just to clone the cocapods repo...
They were actually using shallow clones which were more performance intensive for GitHub’s backend.