I eventually found an answer by strich: on https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/issues/911
I’ve had similar issues in the past and I think there may be a
potential bug in cloning with git lfs (Still to be determined). You
can try this method of fetching the repo, which is in fact faster too:
// Skip smudge - We'll download binary files later in a faster batch
git lfs install --skip-smudge
// Do git clone here
git clone ...
// Fetch all the binary files in the new clone
git lfs pull
// Reinstate smudge
git lfs install --force
This only needs to be done once to initialize the clone for the first
time.Please do test it and let me know if it fixes it.