"I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Codebases on fire, edited in production. I watched websites uploaded from development through an FTP gate. All those files will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die()."

More seriously, the volume of development happening without version control is astounding. FTP-ing an entire codebase to a production directory, with the files named ".bak.1", ".bak.2", etc. is still a common thing.

(For what it's worth I wrote a book on Modernizing Legacy Applications in PHP https://leanpub.com/mlaphp so this subject is close to my heart.)

The point was to add _everything_ to version control. Dependencies, artifacts, outputs, etc. The last project I was refactoring had git the size of 2G because of this, but it saved me a ton of headache. I was refactoring a system that I wasn't deeply familiar with. Having everything in version control allowed me to track how modifying the system code changed the outputs, and if upgrading dependencies broke the program, I could view diff to understand how dependencies changed.