git config not following include paths by default

Using git version 2.25.1 in a bash shell on Ubuntu 20.04 (focal).

My global git config file has an [include] with path set to additional configuration.

"git config --list --show-origin --includes" shows all of my configuration, including items from the included file.

"git config --list --show-origin" shows only the items in my main config file. Not sure why "--no-includes" is the default, but not a huge deal either way.

What is a big deal is that none of the configuration in my included config file is available to me. I have lots of aliases and other settings in the included file, but none of them work.

This can't be the expected behavior, can it? If so, then including config files is pretty useless.