[vorakl]

Then, this explains why. BTW, this is an expected Shell behavior, specified in the POSIX standard:

  If a filename begins with a <period> ( '.' ), the <period> shall be explicitly
  matched by using a <period> as the first character of the pattern or immediately
  following a <slash> character. The leading <period> shall not be matched by:
   * The <asterisk> or <question-mark> special characters

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

Interesting fact about the FreeBSD tar's origins:

  GNU tar was included as the standard system tar in
  FreeBSD beginning with FreeBSD 1.0.
  This is a complete re-implementation based
  on the libarchive(3) library. It was first released with
  FreeBSD 5.4 in May, 2005. 

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tar

My personal journey with FreeBSD began with version 5.3 (the first stable release on the 5th branch) in November 2004. I was completely unaware of such a significant tar change, and apparently I didn't care at the time. However, the entire 5th branch has been so revolutionary compared to the 4th branch that this change is just a drop in the bucket ;)