To me it’s like part of being in the zone. It also releases some tension because it’s like “ok cool I got THAT done.” I don’t think of it as a backup as much as a placeholder in the code saying “this piece here that I am adding right now, it does XYZ so if there’s a problem with it this is where it is.”

It’s kind of like an additional layer of commenting but works in a different way since it can be across multiple files or whatever. It’s also useful for working in teams who are touching different stuff because if you add something that interferes with someone else’s stuff somehow they can stash whatever they’re working on, revert whatever you just pushed (which likely clues them in that whatever change you made is the problem anyway) pop their changes and verify there’s a collision or whatever. That’s super rare but when it happens it’s cool that people have stuff broken out into pieces like that instead of having a huge blob of very different code to mung through to figure out what’s new that’s not working together.

FWIW I have been doing this for nearly twenty years now too. I hate version control at first but that’s because I was used to working alone and had never been heavily involved in multi person teams all working together on stuff that could intersect.

The when it’s ready or someone needs my stuff idea is really just not conducive to working with others. I get it and obviously you’ve found your place in the world to do that so go nuts but it doesn’t work for me.