In reply to Ciprian Popescu.

Yes, but if you are building a theme, those rules are totally different. I’m talking about using version control for building a theme on a local WordPress install, with something like LocalWP. When you make a change to a pattern file, you can push that change up to something like GitHub and you won’t lose it upon theme update. You can also re-use or even distribute that theme. This saves a theme developer from needing to manually manage pattern PHP files in something like vscode, which is the only other alternative at this time.