Ah, okay. I get now what the question meant. Sorry, it's past midnight here and my brain is ketchup. Git's own protocols let you talk to a remote repo without cloning it, so why not use that, right? Multiple reasons:

- Tree listing. There's no raw HTTP URL that gives you a directory listing. raw.githubblabla.com can't do directory indexes. You'd have to shell out to git ls-tree ... etc over the ssh, which means essentially implementing a partial git client.

- Getting subtries is also problematic

- Branch listing and repo search - no git protocol equivalent for those - need the API

- Current approach fetches the entire tree in one API call. Doing the same over pack protocol means negotiating a fetch, receiving packfile data and parsing it. Much heavier, much more code.

We can only imagine a world where git's transport layer gives you a browsable filesystem interface. It doesn't - git's protocols are optimized for syncing object graphs, not random-access file browsing.