That gets access to the repo, but not issues, actions, code reviews, etc etc.

Once you take all this into account:

> That gets access to the repo, but not issues, actions, code reviews, etc etc.

(to the extent that it's external to git, e.g., housed in GitHub rather than the repository), I think we're no longer talking, as your grandparent was, about:

> the most trivially distributed and self-hosted technology ever written ….

I rarely run into projects using just git these days, and I don't seem to have confused anyone by slightly shifting the topic.