The icons resolve to things like https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-GGUF/resolve/main... which wget understands. Presumably there's a greater-than-average risk of corruption in transit when the files are big and git does some sort of integrity checking that one would lose out on? It's the verify-local-data feature I'm really missing from torrent here.

It's HTTPS. Not only are you getting checksumming from TCP, but any block that had bitflips would fail TLS decryption and would fail the entire transfer. You're not going to see silent corruption in transit.

TCP checksums usually prevent corruption, unless the data is already corrupt prior to the checksum computation (which does happen rarely).

I’ve never seen any « corruption in transit » when downloading big files.