From @gefjon:

I would also like to know if we see any alternative path to reducing or removing our usage of git in build scripts, given the problems it's caused both in Git builds and among our users.

One option may be to use git2 as a library instead of an executable.

Another option would be to have a statically generated index of the template files. This could be done in a pre-commit hook, or generated via a command and checked in CI (like our CLI docs, for example).