Computer Science - Gimp Unwanted Feature

While using GIMP, I realized that sometimes there'd be times in which the layer I was working on was't well defined.

Notice how the yellow box doesn't quite line up with the edges. What is happening here is that the yellow box defines the boundaries of the current layer you are on. Unlike as in other image processing software such as photoshop where the boundary size is fixed to the canvas size that you define for the entire image.

This is to allow for different layer sizes so that you can minimize the amount of data each layer requires. The reason for this is because Gimp's functionality was designed on much older computers, and so minimizing the size of the image could be seen as a feature. However, none of its modern competitors have incorporated this feature because it significantly adds to the complexity of manipulating the image, with little to no benefit since the computing power of the average computer has gone up significantly. I will go over an example of an easy way to change how you use gimp in order to more easily use gimp, especially when copy and pasting is done, which completely messes with the boundary of a layer.