And how would you expect it to work? Keep the repo in ~/.local/ or something like AppData? What happens then if you want to have two clones of the same repo? What if you want to move a clone around (e.g. to a different machine)? Of course it's possible to find solutions to these issues, but they will never be as simple and easy to use as the current model (btw: git supports having the magic directory external to the working tree).

It's non-obvious and unexpected if you have never used a VCS and didn't read a single page describing git. In which case almost everything in git will be unexpected and non-obvious (so will be any programming language or technology).

But I agree that the problem shouldn't be trying to avoid handling out the .git dir to everybody. The problem is - git clone in document root of the webserver for website deployment is a terrible idea and was never a supported usecase.

edit: so I came the third! Should try typing quicker.