This isn’t a knock against opensource programming, but there shouldn’t ever be precompiled blobs in the repo unless they are the official builds for the various OS’s and if you want to build from source, the pre-compiled blobs shouldn’t be part of that, otherwise you can’t really claim you are opensource.
I don’t know about the history of the project, but it sounds like those blobs have been there for quite some time. When in reality, the PR that added the blobs in the first place shouldn’t ever have been approved.
Actually just checked 3+ years.