CI failures due to 'project' submodule not found and version-cal #9919

Our team uses a fork for this repo at https://github.com/AzureArcForKubernetes/k8s-extension

On my most recent PR on the forked repo, I see a CI failure caused by a broken submodule/worktree state around projects
Link to PR - AzureArcForKubernetes#18

What failed

The job log shows:

fatal: no submodule mapping found in .gitmodules for path 'projects'
later: fatal: No url found for submodule path 'projects' in .gitmodules
then the linter step fails because the checkout/env is corrupted:
'/home/runner/work/k8s-extension/azure-cli-extensions' is not a valid git repository.
The workflow definition at .github/workflows/AzdevLinter.yml uses actions/checkout@v4 with sparse checkout and then relies heavily on git checkout, git fetch, and repo history in later steps, especially in:

lines 19–24: checkout
lines 36–53: diff computation
lines 81–97: azdev linter run
Because the runner believes projects is a submodule path but the repo at this ref does not define it in .gitmodules, git cleanup and subsequent repo operations break.

There are also other CI failures related to version-cal and version-output.

Need help with resolving these issues and unblock the PR.