No you are correct, do not doubt yourself. Baked in behavior catering to a completely separate tool is bad design. Git is the current version control software but its not the first nor last. Imagine if we move to another source control and are burdened with .gitignore files. No thanks.

The Unix tools are designed to be good and explicit at their individual jobs so they can be easily composed together to form more complex tools that cater to the task at hand.