If we supply the same set of paths to git sparse-checkout add and scalar prefetch --stdin-folders-list, the prefetch command gets a smaller set of files than the sparse-checkout requires when writing files to disk. This leads to a very slow first checkout, even after prefetching.
The real solution is described in #36.
However, it may be worth a temporary fix to the BlobPrefetcher to match a few more paths and speed this up in the short term.