Exactly so. The problem with submodules isn't the concept itself, it's the lack of transparency. The submodule state should always be kept up to date with the

Exactly so. The problem with submodules isn't the concept itself, it's the lack of transparency. The submodule state should always be kept up to date with the state of the working tree, so that you never end up in a situation where it is stale and out of sync with everything else. Git LFS has a similar problem, but there it does at least check out the content by default. But even there there have been too many times I've had to manually fetch things, or push things manually to different remotes.