You're minimizing the overhead. `git commit -a` also won't help you with new or renamed files. So when you write about "the overhead of typing -a", what you really mean is the overhead of

1. typing `git commit`, checking the output, then typing `git commit -a`, or

2. typing `git commit`, then moving on with your life, and realizing minutes, hours, or days later that the changes you meant to include were not actually included, so you have to go back and add them if you're lucky, untangle them from whatever subsequent changes you were trying to make and/or do an interactive rebase if you're unlucky, and maybe face the prospect of doing a `git push --force` if you're really unlucky

Scale that up to several days or weeks to match the learning period and repeat for every developer who has to sit down and interact with it. That's the overhead we're talking about.

The article got it right; this is a monumental waste of human effort.

> Every developer has a finite number of brain-cycles