This take is surprising to me as I spent a decade using cvs/svn and at the end of that I didn’t really understand how it worked well enough to have any confidence branching and merging. Switching to git was a steep learning curve but made so much more conceptual sense that in a few months I was very confident in branching and merging and with a couple years had a deep and intuitive understanding of rebasing. Git allows me to edit my work before I push it, committing early and often to help my local development, then editing and packaging into atomic and well-documented commits that will make sense years down the line without wading through the irrelevant hiccups that were part of the short-term development cycle.

I won’t defend the git porcelain because it is incredibly baroque, but because it’s backed by a robust a simple data model underneath I see that as more of a rote memorization challenge than a fundamental flaw. This is far preferable to svn which conflates repos, directories, branches and tags, resulting in the possibility of nonsensical operations and unresolvable merge situations.