I.e. was it just a crazy requirement handed down, or did they not know better?
I just can't imagine it even for solo development, nevermind collaborative work! "Agh. We must have had a merge conflict, damn, the core part of my work is gone... Let me see if I have a recent copy... Oop, no, I don't, because I've run out of disk space from all these clone backups."
I do occasionally get Dropbox-level merge conflicts for tmp editor/IDE files, but I can't recall getting any for source files.
GP seems to be deliberately avoiding commands relating to remote management, such as push.
It worked OK for that purpose. And I still have dropbox mainly for that reason. My source code is always local. Everything goes into TFS, but the local is backed up to dropbox.