They invented .gitignore to prevent those files to get checked in into the repository.

Head, paper, keyboard is what we did in the 80s when compilers were too slow to afford throwing code at them and fix the errors later. Was that code in the HN story a substantial piece of code or some 100 lines program? Our programs used to be small.

.gitignore doesn't prevent you from committing unwanted files if a pattern is missing. This is a real example: .gitignore had ".sqlite3" extension ignored, but this coworker created a test database as ".dbsq3" or something like that for some reason. He forgot to add the pattern to .gitignore and the file was commited.

Also you can have .env in the .gitignore, yet someone create their file as .env.local and escape the .gitignore pattern. It's easy to come after and lecturing about creating a better .gitignore pattern, but it's even easier to at the very least take a little care of your commits even if it means slower speeds.