Telling developers to not use the global .gitignore seems to be the wrong response. For example, I use VS Code, its extensions, and various other development tools that create local files that should not be in repositories. Those files and directories do not belong in a repository's .gitignore file, unless it's a personal project. They most often belong in a global .gitignore unless a team uses a common set of tools. Having a single developer's custom tools be handled by a repository's .gitignore seems to be the wrong approach.