It appears that the behavior actually included a git clean. Which is insane in my opinion.

Yeah. Building a convenient accessible context free way to run git clean...sure feels like the actions of someone who just wants to watch the world burn.

Yeah, it's unclear to me at the time if the dialogue box in the screenshot appeared when doing a select all operation, but it reads as though the OP dev didn't understand git, discarded their work, and got upset that it was an option.

Realistically if the dialogue box appeared, I'm not sure there would be anything else the IDE could do to prevent the dev from themselves. Perhaps reject operations affecting 5000 files? But then you'll just have someone with the same issue for 4000 files.

He said they're not going to change it, just make the dialog a lot more clear and add a second button to it that will only do a reset without the clean.