However, one of the benefits to Git is that it is enormously flexible, and Git can be and is successfully leveraged to provide large file functionality using this mechanism. Before I maintained Git LFS or knew how it worked, I hypothesized that this would be the ideal mechanism to do handling of large files, so it shouldn't be surprising that the original developers decided to do so. We just need to be cognizant that as with any design, there are going to be some limitations, which is what I was mentioning in that thread.
As a side note, it's intentional that we don't use hard links or symlinks into the LFS storage because that makes it extremely easy to destroy or corrupt data by modifying the working tree, so Git's behavior here is actually helpful. There is copy-on-write functionality in Git LFS that can be used if your file system supports it to make the size of the repository a little less painful with large files.