The point was to add _everything_ to version control. Dependencies, artifacts, outputs, etc. The last project I was refactoring had git the size of 2G because of this, but it saved me a ton of headache. I was refactoring a system that I wasn't deeply familiar with. Having everything in version control allowed me to track how modifying the system code changed the outputs, and if upgrading dependencies broke the program, I could view diff to understand how dependencies changed.