Cool. You've convinced me. A small change in workflow + easy cleanup sounds like it addresses most of my concerns. Though if I were to adopt jj I'd still probably just turn off the feature at first until I saw where I could have used it in practice. I'm going to wait and see for a bit myself. I'm pretty comfortable with git.
The way jj tracks changes isn't a feature you can turn off AFAIK. Maybe you can, but if you can, you shouldn't. This is fundamental to the jj internals and workflow.
As someone who also kept a lot of files in their repo that went untracked, it was a small adjustment. Add to my .gitignore, untrack the files, and done.
You can disable automatically adding untracked files to the repo, but you can't disable it from automatically incorporating changes to tracked files. I believe GP was talking about the former.