> Why wouldn't you want to see them in your `git status`?

I tend to function poorly around cognitive clutter. It distracts me from the important stuff: the files I’ve decided to put under version control. YMMV.

> will become invisible to an increasingly large number of tools (vscode, ag aka silversearcher, ripgrep, emacs's projectile to name a few)

That doesn’t really seem to be the case with VS Code. Ignored files appear grey but they’re still showing up for me.