Newer versions have improved greatly in that regard, but sure you still find too many tutorials etc. using git checkout for everything.

Sure, but most of those are things you rarely need and it’s not like Mercurial was an AI which always knew what you meant - anyone who ever tried to explain merge-queues to someone else knows that some concepts are just harder than others.

No need for hard concepts.

I am talking of things like "opsie, I don't want to commit this yet" (git reset) and "destroy all my work" (git reset --hard) being a command line switch apart. That's just wrong. That's so wrong I keep git reset --hard safety net around, in fact. https://gist.github.com/chx/85db0ebed1e02ab14b1a65b6024dea29

Kind of like how “hg update” becomes “destroy all my work” with -C? At some point you do need to learn what things to be careful about. Git’s reflog will avoid most forms of data loss but uncommitted/staged changes are a harder problem than it might seem.