Git doesn't even keep history of changes, just snapshots before and after the changes. A very common problem is viewing history of a single file as it gets modified and renamed - this information just isn't stored. It's common for tools to show file history incorrectly - i.e. a previous version is removed and the new one (with small changes) magically appears.
E.g. see https://portal.perforce.com/s/article/3447 for Perforce.
Just the fact that people keep using placeholder files should be enough to convince anybody. But if you want to use git for software development, well, almost all development conventions mandate directory intentionally kept empty or to exist before their contents exist. I've never seen anybody decide on something that doesn't.
Never heard about this, nor can I imagine what purpose it could serve.
There's nothing stopping a UI tool from figuring out that a file was moved or split into multiple files -- it just has to do so from looking at the state before and the state after. Git has gotten better at this over the years and keeps improving, so newer versions of git will be able to look at existing git repositories and synthesize better views of the history.
This seems like splitting hairs given you can trivially derive one from the other.