Yes, it's definitely the former case, thankfully. Agreed that it's strange, but it's hard to put a technical reason behind it if I decide to push for hosting it somewhere better.
I can't exactly put my finger on it, but something feels off. For example, on my first day, I wasn't able to view the files in Windows Explorer (or clone the repo, actually), so the other dev just gave me a zip file of the repo. There's something fishy going on, and I'm trying to figure it out.
That may be the case, but the original engineers have made other highly questionable decisions: the backend service was written in Java 8...just last year!
This is actually a very large government agency, with many internal as well as external projects hosted on those services, in the public instances as well as our own internal hosted instances of those services. But as long as there's no glaring issues with it, and it's a generally acceptable practice, then I'm fine with it as it doesn't really affect my day to day use via command line.
That probably is the case, but in my mind I'm also questioning if they're backing it up regularly, what prevents someone from going in and deleting the files, etc.