For hobby projects, I've absolutely committed an SQLITE database in the past to serve as an HTTP cache; I was relying on an external API with some pretty hefty usage limits but at the same time was also certain that the data I was requesting from that API would never change, so I could just keep all responses around and reuse them forever (and it was easier to cache the response than to write a bespoke serialization format for converting them). Yeah, it's technically a build artifact (because it's not code) but it's better than getting 429 errors on every new dev machine for an hour + it was just hobbyist code, nothing meant for professional use.
We're focused on this problem at XetHub.
- Llama2 git repo with ~600 GB of model files: https://xethub.com/XetHub/Llama2
- RedPajama git repo with 3.4 terabytes of data: https://xethub.com/XetHub/RedPajama-Data-1T