Ignore but not .gitignore

I had an instance where I wanted to ignore the WordPress plugin Query Monitor. But I didn't necessarily want to commit that to .gitignore. It's only my local environment I care about right now.

I found this blog post by Luis Dalmolin that helped me - https://luisdalmolin.dev/blog/ignoring-files-in-git-without-gitignore/#:~:text=To%20ignore%20untracked%20files%2C%20you,tracking%20any%20(untracked)%20file.

Summary

Essentially there is another location you can use to exclude files from git without using .gitignore.

Seems to me it functions just like .gitignore only it's not committed to git so it won't impact others working on the repo.

I'm not totally sure it's not a bad footgun, but that's why I'm writing this post.