As someone raised on git, and is seriously confused/scared every time he has to use svn, I'm not sure what you mean. I use the folder git creates as a repo too?
The subtlety is that the checkout command as written is checking out only a subdirectory, not the entire repository. Look closely at the given checkout url.
Ahhhh, that's quite interesting. I could see why that'd be a big deal for a monorepo.
Per my understanding of SVN, a checkout only downloads the lastest version of all the files ("pristines"). Git on the other hand clones just about everything from the remote repository, giving you a fully-fledged repository locally. SVN operations that need more history like log and blame will communicate with the repository for that info.
This isn't example isn't about not copying history (partial clone on the time dimension) it is about not copying the full directory tree but only a subdirectory (partial clone on the spatial dimension).