This is the single most significant difference between Smalltalk and other languages. Several Smalltalk dialects use images that were last bootstrapped from scratch sometime in the late 70s. If you insist on using git for version control, yes, this is a nightmare. On the other hand, there are several high-quality version control tools for Smalltalk, and in practice, it's not a problem.

It is pretty weird for nubies, though.