You can do, as mentioned in issue 1139, a Fetch with prune.
Or remove Remote Branch from list in Pull issue 2765.
That will clean-up any remote branches still locally referenced, while they are already deleted in the upstream repo.
in terms of Git itself is a local version of a branch considered totally decoupled from the remote?
It can be.
If a branch has an remote tracking branch associated to it, git branch -vv can show it.
But removing said remote tracking branch has no bearing on the local branch.
i.e. there is no reason why deleting the remote version should automatically mean the local one is deleted?
Sure: you pushed by mistake a ‘test‘ branch:
- you want to delete it on the remote repo
- but you very much want to keep it on your local repo to pursue some local tests you have no intention of pushing.