To be fair, yes, it is a bit fragile and cumbersome, though it works for me.

However, it doesn't makes "git -p" less useful when the idea is to separate what you want to publish and what you want to keep in your work zone, be is your working copy or a dev branch.

As always with git, it is not very opinionated, it lets users have their own opinions, and they do! Monorepos vs many repos, rebase vs merge, clean vs honest history,... it can do it all, and I don't think the debates will ever settle on what is an "antipattern" as I don't think there is a single "right" answer.

Yeah, TIMTOWTDI, different strokes, etc... and I'm not claiming there's "one true way". I was just reacting (almost viscerally) to the idea of deliberately maintaining diffs in a stateful local env, which feels like it's begging for "works on my machine" issues. My instinct to avoid that, on principle, extends beyond project source code to "fiddly" local dev environments, seeking things like devcontainers, fully-reproducible builds for CI, etc.