> then you can either prune it down to a more recent date range

Yes, this is the required inevitable hack to get around it, which involves rewriting the history in various, creative, ways, which (last I checked) changes all the git commits SHAs, invalidating all the issue tracker links, and everyone doing a bunch of manual work to get things sane on their local sides, which are now unrelated history.

Git was not build for any of this.