The latest version of git has a very similar feature called “partial clones” to what the author describes for Mercurial. All the data is still in your history, no extra tools are needed, but you only fetch the blobs from the server for the commits you checkout. So just like LFS larger blobs not on master are effectively free, but you still grab all the blobs for your current commit.

You need server side support, which GitHub and GitLab have, and then a special clone command:

    git clone --filter=blob:none 

Some background about the feature is here: https://github.blog/2020-12-21-get-up-to-speed-with-partial-...