Finally, finally, I looked into whether you can actually change the color settings of the git status output. For a long time, I was annoyed that I could hardly read the modified section, as it was in a rather dim red. Not a good contrast if you have a black background…
Nonetheless, I came across this stackoverflow answer, which solved the problem. You merely had to add the following to your $HOME/.gitconfig file:
[color]
ui = true
[color "status"]
changed = red bold
untracked = red bold
added = green bold