Seriously, what were they thinking. This completely invalidates the use of submodules. We want our code to be available without having to know git. That’s the whole reason they have the download a zip link. But not including all of the code means you have to unzip the code and then use git to get the submodules.
Submodules are great for code reuse. But if I can’t intend my project to be downloaded by people that just want to install it and not code anything while using submodules. This is horrible.