[ongy]

the git server would continue to work.

The cli really isn't the greatest either way. But there's lots of infrastructure to make the sharing work reasonably well.

[conartist6]

You could also think of it this way: if I abuse git's protocols to do my thing, I pretty much give up my chance to become a standard in the future. If people are going to adopt a new standard they want it to be clean: you don't want to be trying to sell a greenfield technology that's loaded up with legacy tech debt. Making a data format that renders broken in every existing tool that touches it would be showing a lot of bad faith up front.