You might be interested to know that you can set the date of a commit arbitrarily: https://codewithhugo.com/change-the-date-of-a-git-commit/
Yes, one can always schedule it with a script, but the advice still stands (I'm very much like the OP in that regard).
Why would anybody do that ?
At one of my previous jobs we had to deal with a proprietary, combined version control and time reporting system that to us, developers, felt like utter garbage. Only later on I learned that it was used by our main customer because it facilitated workflows useful in a mid-to-large corp, and some of our pain points were in fact conflicts between "the developer way" and "the business at large way".
As for "industry-standard tools", I find it hard to use this term in our industry. There's a diverse range of practices and recommendations.
Git is popular in some subset of the industry (around web in particular), but I'm hesitant in calling it an industry-standard tool. I don't know if there are estimates around the size of it, but there's plenty of proprietary 'shadow' tooling and practices hiding under the surface.
Because they have good reasons to?[1][2][3] There really is more to version control than Git.
[1]https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...
[2]https://www.perforce.com/9-10-top-semiconductor-companies-us...
[3]https://code.fb.com/core-data/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/
It’s all just data. Even if git didn’t offer the ability to edit all of these
- Author
- Committer
- Author date
- Commit date
Which by the way it does allow of course, as it should. See for example git commit-tree. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit-tree
Anyway, even if git itself did not provide the tools to set this information on a per-commit basis you could still of course change your ~/.gitconfig and adjust your system clock time prior to committing. Or you could edit the commit data using a third-party tool that you yourself or someone else created. Like I said, it’s all just data.
Just because a file says something doesn’t mean that what it is saying is true, basically. Same goes for a piece of software.
And signing provides limited value as well, though useful to some. But for example you still wouldn’t know that the date information was correct even if the commit was signed.
Personally though I prefer to just commit things when I do them and push them immediately. And I don’t sign my commits but I would be willing to do so if there was any reason to — for example if it was the policy of a company I worked for that we do so.