It's not really fair to call it "dysfunctional source control usage" (at least no fairer than the OA). The problem is with large asset files, which though almost always "generated" in the sense that people don't hand-craft them like code, are not necessarily a function of what is stored in the repo.

I'll agree with you that making git handle huge binary repositories speedily is probably not a worthwhile effort.

Asset files, as in triplefox's comment above, are a very different thing from the OA's mention of keeping the object files from nightly builds and anything else they think of to throw into the repository.

For program source control, throwing in a bunch of unnecessary files is dysfunctional. Assets are, by definition, not unnecessary files.