Most applications could probably get away with not supporting control characters in paths, even git, because most file systems/OSes doesn’t support it anyway, as a user of control characters in a paths you can never trust it to work anyway.
_I_ would agree with you. But I’m also not a person writing a version control system for a kernel that still runs wrong-endianess hardware (I forgot which one we are using and can’t be bothered to look it up). And I think a major part of this is, that I assume that something is so insane, that people just shouldn’t do it and the people steering the kernel or git don’t (get to) assume that