I know your link says you don't want to do `gc --aggressive --prune all`, but for anyone who does: a) That still leaves objects referenced by the reflog, so you may want to `reflog expire --expire=now --all` first if your reflog is full of rebases etc that you don't need, and b) you may want to run gc twice because the second time compacts a tiny bit more than the first.

Disk space is cheaper than lost data.

True, but wouldn't the reduction in size make it a little quicker to transfer over slow networks?

You might be interested in the `git maintenance` subcommand that was introduced in Git 2.31. It can do per-repository automatic background garbage collection on a configurable schedule, among other things.