[elijahwright_]

there's a good reason why this isn't done this way. Git is very open ended but there are .gitignore templates out there. ideally anyone submitting a pull request should be looking at what they're adding. but the real issue here is this:

> Luckily, you realize that you can turn the blacklist of files (the gitignore) into a whitelist, by just ignoring everything and manually un-ignoring desired files.

this will not work and tbh it's fitting a square peg in a round hole. it technically might fit if you shave off the square enough but large repos don't do this, they use a round peg: https://github.com/github/gitignore