I tried to publish a very simple static site with Netlify not that long ago (post COVID lockdowns). Just several (~4) plain text (unminified) JS, CSS, and HTML

I tried to publish a very simple static site with Netlify not that long ago (post COVID lockdowns). Just several (~4) plain text (unminified) JS, CSS, and HTML files. There was also a .git directory pointing to a non-GitHub remote, not that it should matter, since I wasn't trying to use Netlify for builds. I just wanted it to do a straightforward deployment on par with FTPing your work to a dumb host. Turns out, this did matter. The Netlify CLI was so thoroughly confused by the presence of this .git subdirectory that it failed hard. Not even a cryptic error or stack trace, the process just up and terminated. It took some poking around before I realized that what the trigger was. The utter failure to handle what seemed to me to be a straightforward, "hello world" sort of use case did not inspire confidence.