Sounds good in theory. In practice, you get stuff like https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/cache-tree.c#L246

I can't tell what's wrong with that — could you elaborate?

It's fine. but it's not exactly small, either. It does a lot of different things.

This is something many people don’t do. They just put some weird statements that will change with time and deciphering what they meant is pain