Literally the only pre-commit hook I've ever "liked" has been one to look for files over ~1/2MB, and error with a message describing how to bypass the check (env var). It stops the mistake at the easiest-to-identify point, and helped teach a lot of people about how to set gitignore or git-attributes correctly when it is most relevant and understandable. Every single other one has been a massive pain at some point...

... but even that one took several rounds of fiddling and complexifying to get it to behave correctly (e.g. merging commits with already-committed bypassed binaries should be allowed. how do you detect that? did you know to check for that scenario when building the hook? someone's gonna get bitten by it, and there are dozens of these cases).

So yea. Agreed. Do not use pre-commit hooks, they're far more trouble than they seem, and the failure modes / surprises are awful and can be quite hard to figure out to laymen who are experiencing it.

(much of this is true for all git hooks imo)