Right, but for what purpose? I don't see much gain, and now you're left trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The git CLI would be technically working, but not practically useful. Same with an IDE: if you checked the files out you could technically open them but not easily change your program.

the git server would continue to work.

The cli really isn't the greatest either way. But there's lots of infrastructure to make the sharing work reasonably well.