But you are also almost intentionally confusing the SQL standard here in your comment with the SQLite implementation (a de facto standard, of a sort, but not a recognized standard by any body of peers to my knowledge) with SQLite's particular binary format (which does change between versions even). That is a custom file format with custom code. Certainly it is very portable custom code, as SQLite is open source and ported to a large number of systems, but just because it is related to the SQL standards doesn't gift it the benefit of being an SQL standard in and of itself.

The SQL standards define a query language, not a storage format. There are SQL databases that themselves optimize their internal storage structures into "piles of files". In fact, most have at one point or another. SQLite is an intentional outlier here; it's part of why SQLite exists.

There's nothing stopping anyone from building an SQL query engine that executes over a git database, for what that is worth. Because you can't execute SQL queries against it today doesn't really say anything at all about whether or not git's database storage format is insufficient or not.

All of that is also before you even start to get into the weeds about standards compliance in the SQL query language itself and how very little is truly compliant between database engines, as they all have slightly different dialects due to historic oddities. Or the weeds that there's never been a good interchange format between SQL database storage formats other than overly verbose DDL and INSERT statement dumps. That again are sometimes subject to compatibility failures if trying to migrate between database engines, due to dialectal differences. Including what should be incredibly fundamental things like making sure that foreign key relationships import and index correctly, without data loss or data security issues, because even some of that is dialectal and varies between engines (drop keys, ignore keys, read keys, make sure everything is atomically transacted to the strongest transaction level available in that particular engine, etc).

Git's current pile of files may not be better than "a full-fledged SQL database", that's a long and difficult academic study to undertake, but a "a full-fledged SQL database" isn't necessarily the best solution just because it has a mostly standard query language, either.