If you have a centralized version control system such as Clearcase or SVN, it's not such a grief to have binaries in VCS, whereas its kind of a problem for git & co.
Google has a legendarily awesome centralized version control system.
It started as Perforce. Then they built better wrappers around it, then they stopped using perforce commands at all, then they rewrote the wrappers without reference to Perforce at all.
Google has a legendarily awesome centralized version control system.