We discussed that, but it wasn't clear that doing so was portable. It works for OpenSSH. It doesn't for PuTTY. We don't know what other implementations people might have as `ssh` on their systems.
It seems a little risky to assume separate clients/platforms will always interpret command line arguments the same way. At some point when a client breaks compatibility you have to implement methods to support the one-offs, or drop support. So for portability's sake, why not start writing those methods now, and have a generic universal method to fall back on for untested clients/versions?
How would a program like git figure out what flavor of "ssh" program is on the system? Keep in mind that it may change while a long-running git command is running.
What happens if you do the -- fix and then use PuTTY? If it just fails then I'd argue that's OK, PuTTY will get updated as a result of the failure, no?
Or is that really unnecessary?