That happened to me few months ago when a new submodule was added that gets updated regularly (old ones are some legacy libs just lying there). I literally had to beg some colleagues to not forget to commit the changed submodule ref to host/main project. None of them even understood why it was needed since "it would anyway be solved by `git submodule update --init --recursive` anyway".

Also, of late I have turned to "a lover of git GUI apps" form a full "git in cli is the best evangelist". But that has happened for most other tools as well. I guess I am kind of done with cli.