The entire design of git was intended to be decentralized. You really don't even need the centralized bare repo! You can just point your machines at each other. With Tailscale these days that's especially easy.
Admittedly, I'm getting old, but for the first couple years I used git professionally ~2008-2011 we just pulled from each other's machines. Directly over SSH. We worked in an office, all had each other's machines as remotes. "Hey, is that feature done? Cool, I'll pull it". It worked really well.
Eventually we tossed a bare repo up on a server in the office and switched to push instead of pull. Finish a feature? Push it up! At some point our devops guy installed Gitlab around that, but we never really used the web ui.
Winds changed, we moved to GitHub, eventually a pull request / code review workflow. Here we are now.
My first exposure to Git and GitHub was through GitHub Pages. I was told to use the GitHub web editor, ignore all the ‘git’ stuff, and just write the HTML files there. Then I grew into using GitHub desktop and later VSCode’s git integration. At no point did I have to use ‘git’ on the command line so I didn’t really understand what the tool did or why. I think many people simply don’t see git without GitHub. Some even see GitHub without touching git eg. see the infamous ‘I am new to GitHub and I have lots to say’ post https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...
Haha I'm jealous.
We used Airdrop.
And then I was like "shouldn't we use git?"
"Nah, this works fine, you have the code you need now, don't you?"
I was still in my second year of my information science bachelor and he was +60 years old and had programmed for over 2 decades. I was not going to argue with someone that experienced. In retrospect, I should have. But I'd probably been shot down with being "that youngster that always wants to use new technologies" (despite git not being that new anymore).
I have the stock git server on a vm, gitweb to view things in the browser and gitolite for basic permission management.
Very low tech, almost no maintenance necessary and I dont more for hosting personal projects