Taking this to the extreme, I think most lessons represent sunset or dead projects. There's no sweet illusions anymore. No assumptions. No ego. No account for infinite flexibility. No shine. No excitement of a new thing. No holy wars. No astronaut architects. Only you, the ruins and the truth.

did it ever occur to you that you might be living in a self-reinforcing feedback loop? how long ago have been in interviewee's shoes?

doesn't your precious stash deserve an external folder or remote branch, in any case? the local repo is always a risk, so many things can ruin it. also, you only need to clean up like once a year, it's by definition a rare operation. A ton of branches doesn't grow overnight.

What's wrong with just deleting the whole folder and clone repo and whatever branch you're interested in? In any case it's not an urgent thing. You don't have to do this mid-work, you can wait until you push most stuff and then rm && git clone.

The only case in which this wouldn't work is when you have a ton of necessary local branches you can't even push to remote, which is a risk and anti-pattern per se.

that's true, and nice comparison with tests.