Using GitVersion 5.12.0 in an Azure Devops Pipeline, we get the following error message:

ERROR [07/18/24 14:09:19:18] An unexpected error occurred:
GitVersion.Model.Exceptions.InfiniteLoopProtectionException: Inherited branch configuration caused 50 recursions. Aborting!

That is followed by thousands of lines of branches (this is a pretty old repo with many stale branches), and this message:

Falling back to develop branch config

Many more lines of a Git tree, and then finally this error message:

##[error]TypeError: Cannot read property 'message' of undefined

What is going on here? What is causing the recursion, and how can I get GitVersion to work properly?