Is git's semi-secret empty tree object reliable, and why is there not a symbolic name for it?

Question

Git has a well-known, or at least sort-of-well-known, empty tree whose SHA1 is:

4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904

(you can see this in

Answer 1

Here is the answer on how to create empty tree commit even in the case when the repository is not already empty. https://stackoverflow.com/a/14623458/9361507

But I prefer "empty" to be tag, but not a branch. Simple way is:

git tag empty $(git hash-object -t tree /dev/null)

Because tag can point to tree-ish directly, without commit. Now to get all the files in the working tree:

git diff --name-only empty

Or the same with stat:

git diff --stat empty

All files as diff:

git diff empty

Check whitespaces in all files:

git diff --check empty