Re Is Git Add Supposed to Work Like This (git 2.50)?

To answer very shortly, "It is intended"

Reason: I don't exactly know if I am pointing to the right code lines

But if you dig into builtin/add.c you will find these lines

	/*
	 * Check the "pathspec '%s' did not match any files" block
	 * below before enabling new magic.
	 */
	parse_pathspec(&pathspec, 0,
		       PATHSPEC_PREFER_FULL |
		       PATHSPEC_SYMLINK_LEADING_PATH,
		       prefix, argv);

If you read the comment you will know this is already intented (the behaviour which you described)

- Jayatheerth