From what I understood, it's only "git clone --recursive"/"git clone --recurse-submodules" or "git submodule init ..." that's vulnerable, not bare "git clone".

From what I understood, it's only "git clone --recursive"/"git clone --recurse-submodules" or "git submodule init ..." that's vulnerable, not bare "git clone". So the flow of (1) clone (2) look at .gitmodules (3) git submodule init (4) analyze would still work.