Also, pushing commits from the top level to the subtree repository seems to create duplicate commits git push <subtree repo>git subtree split --prefix=:<subtree repo branch>
Then it seems more reasonable to work within a subtree, push to subtree remote, and git pull -s subtree ...
git merge -Xsubtree=<folder> … --allow-unrelated-histories
git pull -s subtree remotename branchname
git push <subtree repo>
git subtree split --prefix=:<subtree repo branch>
git pull -s subtree ...