In general, I believe in not giving people enough rope to hang themselves, but hiding the rope under a lock (Porcelain commands) that you open by entering complicated commands which weird syntax (Plumbing commands).
.gitattributes are "evil", because they "lie" about what's in the repo. You could use .gitattributes for simple things like line endings on different platforms (Windows vs Unix), but you could also use it for more complex flows where the file you have locally and the file you store in the repo are completely different - filter feature. This would be "magic"/hidden/implicit, rather than explicit for the user who won't understand why github.com shows something and their local filesystem shows something else.
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In general, I believe in not giving people enough rope to hang themselves, but hiding the rope under a lock (Porcelain commands) that you open by entering complicated commands which weird syntax (Plumbing commands).
.gitattributes are "evil", because they "lie" about what's in the repo. You could use .gitattributes for simple things like line endings on different platforms (Windows vs Unix), but you could also use it for more complex flows where the file you have locally and the file you store in the repo are completely different - filter feature. This would be "magic"/hidden/implicit, rather than explicit for the user who won't understand why github.com shows something and their local filesystem shows something else.