I actually find the way that Git handles branches/commits and the ability to check out an individual ref to be very well thought out and extremely useful.

Re "eating work", most of the commands that could potentially "eat work" are explicit about blowing things away, and is more a problem of not knowing what your tool is going to do. And Git will never "eat" anything that's actually been committed or stashed without you explicitly telling Git to drop that data.

`git help <command>` should be used liberally if you're not certain of what it's going to do. The documentation is extremely thorough.