Get up to speed with partial clone and shallow clone
There are many different types of clones beyond the default full clone. If you truly need to have a distributed workflow and want all of the data in your local repository, then you should continue using full clones. If you are a developer focused on a single repository and your repository is reasonably-sized, the best approach is to do a full clone.
You might switch to a blobless partial clone if your repository is very large due to many large blobs, as that clone will help you get started more quickly. The trade-off is that some commands such as git checkout or git blame will require downloading new blob data when necessary.