Gosh, I’m so pleased for all the replies here. I felt the same way. Submodules made me feel stupid, like my mental model of Git was just entirely broken.

What I wanted to do was be able to have people work against a pinned version of a different Git repo, then update the sub module whenever we felt the need and handle the build breaks. This task seemed impossible to do correctly over time, which I just could not understand. How was the submodule getting updated when I didn’t call anything? Why are submodule changes appearing in other commits? I just couldn’t figure it out.

I am joining a new project and they started talking about submodules and I what I said was “yeah uhhuh cool” but inside I was pretty nervous . But I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t because I was a dummy and they knew exactly what they were doing, so I kept quiet.