You're absolute right from my experience. I"ve seen many shops using svn:externals to tie build dependencies together. And now that git is starting to see wider adoption within industry (not just software companies) the same is attempted with git submodules and git annex. It's horrible because this is not the use case these features were designed for, but people try anyway and eventually run into road blocks.

This tends to happen especially in shops that migrate off process-heavy monsters like clearcase and MKS. These tools do a lot more than just version control, and no open source version control system by itself matches what users of these systems expect. You have to throw at least an issue tracker and a good build tool into the mix as well.