It's wild how people write without version control... Maybe I'm missing something.

yeah, "git init" (if you haven't botherered to create a template repo) is not exactly cumbersome.

Thankfully modern source control doesn't reuse user-supplied filenames for its internals. In the dark ages, I destroyed more than one checkout using commands of the form:

  find -name '*somepattern*' -exec clobbering command ...