I don’t do as the parent does, but I’ve thought about it. The main difference is that a remote repo still requires an action to achieve backup parity. Using Dropbox your changes would start syncing the second you type :w. So even if you don’t finish the current development thought-line and commit upstream, you’re still backed up.

Still not sure if it’s a good idea or not, but not being able to ignore node_modules was the real blocker for me before.