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Sounds to me like he may not actually understand how git works, or he's following bizarre conventions that I've seen before from overseas devs I've worked with to just overwrite the entire project every commit

He must be using push --force in that case.. which seems like a bad practise.

What they're doing is something like branching off a very old version of master, making changes to file A then trying to merge into the latest version of master, which already has a load of changes to file A. They then resolve the conflict by picking "ours", thus ignoring all changes on origin/master in favour of their own old version of master. This doesn't require a --force.

Oh, that seems even worse!

Sounds like one of those new git conventions that becomes hot every little while. Scripts are written that automate a 10 line git process which along the way gets mangled or copy-pasted wrong and you end up there.