I know what you're going for, but for anyone following along at home: "To avoid confusion and troubles with script usage, aliases that hide existing git commands are ignored." (from git help config)

This is true, namely that git aliases in ~/.gitconfig cannot override git built-ins.

That said, the parent post showed what looked like a bash alias, not a git alias.

The bash alias is correct. The issue was "too many commands", which is a non-issue. You type in the commands once, make it an alias, and be done with it. When switching to another repository system, change the "commit" alias, not what your fingers have to remember.