or .gitallow

Yes, but people miss often what is committed, especially if the change is big.

Eh? You explicitly have to add files to the stage before git will commit anything.

I like the analogy with ports, I also do the same - ufw deny all :)

yes, lazygit is huge, I mentioned it in the article too

yes, but user level is not a repo level

Yes, but this is exactly the sort of thing that should be a user-level configuration. A personal scratch directory has nothing to do with the repository itself and doesn’t belong in a repo’s .gitignore.

If it's only needed for one particular checkout, .git/info/exclude is the other obvious option.

You don't need to put the scratch directory in the committed gitignore file. gitignore files are recursive. So a common approach is to use a gitignore with * in the scratch directory.

In my 12 years of software engineering I've seen 10s of times people commit junk.

I do the same