I too loathe git submodules (which I have to use daily). But there is one case where they're not too terrible: It's where you have some kind of "meta project"

I too loathe git submodules (which I have to use daily). But there is one case where they're not too terrible: It's where you have some kind of "meta project" that needs to coordinate other large projects together. An example is where you need to combine specific versions of the Linux kernel, glibc and gcc (eg that you have tested and know work together). A git project with one submodule pinned to the tested commit of each of Linux/glibc/gcc seems to work well. You can, for instance, test a new combination of submodules together and if they work push an atomic commit to update them all together.