> Obviously smarter people than I disagree, but my dumdum head just feels that way.

That's absolutely not it. What you're describing is part of the UNIX philosophy: programs should do one thing and do it well, and they should function in a way that makes them very versatile and composable, etc.

And that part of the philosophy works GREAT when everything follows another part of the philosophy: everything should be based on flat text files.

But for a number of reasons, and regardless of whatever we all think of those reasons, we live in a world that has a lot of stuff that is NOT the kind of flat text file grep was made for. Binary formats, minified JS, etc. And so to make the tool more practical on a modern *nix workstation, suddenly more people want defaults that are going to work on their flat text files and transparently ignore things like .git.

It's just that you've showed up to an wildly unprincipled world armed with principles.