I don't think I would agree with that statement. I would say that both are actually what most people want when using submodules, otherwise you would just vendor

I don't think I would agree with that statement. I would say that both are actually what most people want when using submodules, otherwise you would just vendor your dependency. I would also agree with OP that submodules are horrible. Source: I have to deal with them everyday in my company's repo and they cause issues pretty much every time I pull, switch branches, merge/rebase, etc. IMO, one of the MAIN issues with submodules is that there isn't an actual FILE, checked in the repository, and understood by Git, that lists the hash of all the submodules used. So diffs and PRs on Github, git, etc. don't show the actual changes in a way that we're already used to with files.