> Having whitespace-altering "Dummy commit to trigger CI, ugh!"

`git commit --allow-empty` may be sufficient for that "there is a new commit" trigger in many cases. If so, that may be preferable to whitespace changes as those clutter up the blame.

As an aside, my initial commit on a repo is an empty one so that I can branch from a completely empty repo to do radical rewrites and yet maintain a history relationship with that initial empty commit (which I feel is preferable to an orphan branch and then a merge with unrelated histories ... though those tell slightly different stories in the log).