

I don’t think it’s a joke, though it’s not universal, but many services probably either don’t process the image, or use libraries that support webp, and naively limit formats before feeding them in - in those cases, renaming the file can bypass those crappy filters, and other software will probably figure out the filetype based on the actual data.
If they’re ignored files, setting them up locally won’t end up in the repo. If you put a symlink into the repo, fixing that for your setup will register as a change within git, which can cause annoyance and even problems down the line.