No prob. I hear you.
We don't have a formal policy other than all code should be in GitLab by project completion, with hopefully periodic pushes throughout the life of the project.
I usually have a local .git that I initialize and commit to. And then I create a project on the GitLab via the web interface and choose "no" to initialize. And then link my local .git to the GitLab project and then start committing and pushing every few hours.
As far as the static data, it's usually in SharePoint. And I use the SharePoint sync feature to mirror it as a Windows directory. Then I can reference that path in my code. Someone in future could hypothetically clone my code, sync Sharepoint, and edit a few paths in the code, and get it to work. It's not the best solution. The Sharepoint sync path has your username in it. But we haven't come up with anything better. Most of our projects that have to reference static data are "one-offs" and so we don't sweat it too much.
The larger projects that produce living software tend to reference data in a database, and have more developer resources, so there's no SharePoint component.