Non-blob .gitmodules and .gitattributes

Greetings to all!

I've stumbled upon a check that ensures that .gitmodules and .gitattributes must be blobs, yet while I get why they should not be e.g. a symlink, what's the downside of permitting (and ignoring for the actual purpose) e.g. .gitattributes folder?

To better understand my use-case:

$ ls -lA dev/shared
total 8
drwxr-xr-x   3 alexey-pelykh  staff   96 Jun 14 11:53 .editorconfig
drwxr-xr-x   3 alexey-pelykh  staff   96 Jun 14 13:32 .gitattributes
drwxr-xr-x  14 alexey-pelykh  staff  448 Jun 14 11:53 .gitignore
-rwxr-xr-x   1 alexey-pelykh  staff  613 Jun 14 13:33 share

and

$ ls -lA dev/shared/.*
dev/shared/.editorconfig:
total 8
-rw-r--r--  1 alexey-pelykh  staff  377 Jun 14 11:53 shared.editorconfig

dev/shared/.gitattributes:
total 8
-rw-r--r--  1 alexey-pelykh  staff  143 Jun 14 13:32 shared.gitattributes

dev/shared/.gitignore:
total 8
-rw-r--r--  1 alexey-pelykh  staff  4450 Jun 14 11:53 shared.gitignore

Surely, the immediate workaround is use a "_gitattributes" or ".gitattributes_" name for the folder, yet if a directory with .gitignore can exist - why can't .gitmodule or .gitattributes?

Be well,
Alexey