[zvr]

It all depends on your mode of working. You want to have information showing the current state of stuff that changes.

If you only work as the same user, having $USER in the prompt is visual clutter, and you very soon learn to ignore it -- then why have it? If you only work as one user or "root", you can encode this difference in the "$"/"#" character.

Current directory... is very useful. I have worked for years without it (before it was available) and it really made a difference. Yes, it just saves you a command (pwd, dirs, ...), but it's nice to have this info right there.

Where I would agree is the git branch info. How do people use it in their prompt? This is filesystem-level data, totally independent from the current shell session. To give an example: I have two terms (shells) and in both I am in ~/mydir. They both show got branch "master". In one of them I change to another branch. That window's shell prompt gets updated but the other windows still shows me as being in "master". Do people press enter before each command to have the prompt updated to actual values?