Because the git history will still keep it completely to be able to restore it once you go to a commit in which it wasn’t deleted.

And you cannot tell git to completely forget about it as that requires a rewrite of history and this changes all commit hashes which are touched (and any future ones).

There are literally university courses which confidently state “Console logging is far more used and better so we won’t talk about a debugger here”!

Like sure, it’s very likely to be used far more, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at least offer some courses or modules about proper use of a debugger…

Am I understanding that last part correctly?

[…] and actually zipping the file outside of the zipped directory helped a lot

Did they just automatically create a backup zip-bomb in their script‽