Agreed. What kind of data would one want to store encrypted in a git repo besides unencrypted files in the same repo? And why?
It's not uncommon in configuration management. Ansible has ansible-vault which encrypts secrets you then commit. When you need to use them you decrypt them and run your ansible commands.
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/cli/ansible-vault.ht...
It suffers the same problem as any other secrets management in git. If the decryption key leaks, even if your repo hasn't, you have to rotate every secret in case the repo is ever leaked in the future.
Even if Ansible has it that doesn’t mean people should put secrets in GIT repos. It just means a lot of Ansible users wanted it - and from my POV users don’t want correct features, they want what they feel they need.
GIT repo or config files should have references or secret names that should be filled in on the machine where scripts are running. Ideally secrets should never ever be transmitted even encrypted.
That’s people are lazy and don’t want to do proper setup is their problem.
There is nothing that should be encrypted belonging in GIT repo because secrets and encrypted stuff is not meant to be shared/dispersed. Where GIT main purpose is to share and distribute code.