[uasi]

You can, but forks or branches need constant merging or rebasing (and sometimes conflict resolution) for each one. Clean/smudge filters are fiddly to set up correctly and almost certainly require shelling out to another program, which could break. The second-to-last thing you need is your hand-rolled solution breaking on a new environment. If and when you need several advanced features that a stable dotfiles manager already covers, why roll your own?