In the Go world, the whitelist approach is a popular alternative to the standard gitignore, since Go projects can kind of take any structure the developer sees fit.

To me the normal approach makes equal sense. I create a file, but I'm not ready for other people to see it yet, because it's just a placeholder. So I don't add it. But another set of files are ready, and are part of one logical step of the change, so I add them specifically and commit.