We've had dozens of discussions about this here on HN – with lots of evidence and concrete examples.
https://www.google.com/search?q=git+user+experience+site%3An...
Just compare the man pages! "git help clone" vs "hg help clone".
A random (trivial) example off the top of my head. When working with branches:
> git pull
> git switch another-branch
Your branch is behind 'origin/another-branch' by 2 commits, and can be fast-forwarded. (use "git pull" to update your local branch)
... why? I literally just pulled, why are you asking me to pull again? 99% of the people on the planet literally want the last version of that branch (provided there's no local changes leading to a conflict).
Compare with hg:
> hg pull
> hg update another-branch
Done.
I haven't worked with hg in a long time so I can't really provide an "absolute best example". All I can say is that, from memory, hg always got out of the way, and when I wanted to do something out of the ordinary I could either guess how to do it or it was easy to figure out from the manual.
With git, almost nothing's easy. It can become easy if you invest a lot of time in understanding how it works internally (which explains some of its CLI choices). But that to me is a sign of a bad tool. "all obscure things are a quick googling away" - why expose the user to obscure things to begin with?
I see this claim often, but it never is accompanied by evidence or any concrete example.
I've been using Git for years and I never noticed any semblance of unintuitiveness or bad defaults. Everything in the happy path is straight-forward, and all obscure things are a quick googling away.
Do you actually have any concrete example to back your claims? What's the absolute best example you can come up with of said unintuitiveness and unfriendliness?