To be honest sometimes on my hobby project I don’t commit anything in the beginning (I know not great strategy) and then just dump everything in one large commit.

I think that's a reasonable heuristic, but I have projects where I primarily commit to an internal Gitea instance, and then sometimes commit to a public GitHub repo. I don't want people to see me stumbling around in my own code until I think it's somewhat clean.

The repository is less than one week old though; having only the initial commit wouldn't shock me right away.

I might just make dummy commits ("asdadasdassadas") in the prototyping phase and then just squash everything to an "Initial commit" afterwards.