It's an issue with "the UNIX way". I'm not bashing on composability, but the fact that "the UNIX way" is just composability delivered in a bloated, error prone

It's an issue with "the UNIX way". I'm not bashing on composability, but the fact that "the UNIX way" is just composability delivered in a bloated, error prone way. Specifically, the problem here is that git, like almost every other CLI tool, tries to add as many features as possible to make it easy to use from a console. This (coupled with the fact that these things are never documented, as is the case here, unless <exec> is some idiom I'm supposed to be aware of) makes it harder to use in a correct manor (security bugs being a subset of possible problems).