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This was the subject of a presentation at the 2019 Git Merge conference:

Git has always supported large files! What it does not do is treat them specially, with different semantics, which is what git-lfs, git-annex, etc, do.

Of course, but large files don't work well in Git without using an external plugin you mentioned. And external plugins have other problems, e.g. I can't use them without setting up another server (can't use them in git-shell).

Right now I just use "--depth 1" often to prevent the download of the entire history. But it is not ideal.

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I'm building a tool that's meant to be a companion to Git for large files[1]. The core concept is to track large files/directories in a separate content-addressed store and have Git track references to said files. To your "I can't use them without setting up another server" comment, I'm making use of rclone[2] to replicate the file store to any reputable storage service/platform. If you already use S3, for instance, just set up a new bucket.

I'm happy to answer questions and take any feedback.

[1]: https://github.com/kevin-hanselman/dud

[2]: https://rclone.org/

Only github(and maybe other hosters) have a size limit for files.