alt Hacker NewsGrapheneOS is arguing that throwing away the metadata of however many commits and squashing them into a messy tarball is not the "preferred form of the work for making modifications", and that a manual process where you have to fill out a form in order to get a Google Drive link a week later is not "a medium customarily used for software interchange" in current times. Those are quotes from the GPLv2.
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It's an impossible stretch and also a bad idea. Insisting on that interpretation opens up other issues. Revision history may not be available in some cases for various reasons, such as if one pays someone for a large contribution. We could get into arguments about how granular commits need to be to comply with publication requirements. Digital achives containing source code files are certainly customary and easy to use, as opposed to reams of printouts. It would be just as customary and modern to publish on CD and mail the stuff out to anyone who demands the code. Continuous or timely delivery is not guaranteed by the license. One week of wait time is actually reasonable for a process like this, though I expect it might gradually get worse in line with their long-term objective of making the entire thing painful for outside developers.
If distributing under 3(b) then it's legitimate to only supply source on request. Historically source has been distributed without revision control history or metadata and been considered acceptable (the source tarballs on gnu.org are snapshots, for instance) so I think the preferred form argument is also tricky. I agree that there's huge value in having the individual commits, but from a GPL perspective we had this argument when Red Hat started flattening all patches in the RHEL kernel source 15 years ago.