This is close to theological discussion territory, and I can see both sides of the argument, so I'm just going to mention that there is an interesting paper[1] from a couple years ago that uses a rigorous concept design process to attempt to simplify Git, and results in a VCS that does indeed require a simpler mental model (Gitless).

Personally I'm not going to abandon Git and all the tooling and community it comes with just for a simpler mental model, given that I have a moderately good handle on the (mainline) features of git -- and therein lies the problem. (Although note, Gitless does work on top of Git, so you should be able to use it with Github by the looks of things [2]).

I've linked Adrian Colyer's summary of the paper to make it easier to digest:

[1]: https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/10/24/whats-wrong-with-git-a-c... [2]: http://gitless.com/#vs