The thing that CLI have over GUI is programmability, which for programmers is a valuable property. As for me, any repeatable task, I automate away with various degree of effort and quality. If I find myself needing a particular set of commands and flag, I create an alias, a function, or a shell script for that, like `flac2mp3.sh` instead of hunting down through the shell history.

For most vcs tutorial, they don't often use why the history of changes is important, instead focusing on a set of usual commands. Why, not how. Once you have that philosophy down, the tool usage become much more efficient.

I've been using magit for almost a decade now and it directly contradicts what you're saying simply by existing and being as awesome as it is

I thought I would be just fine with the CLI but I was amazed by magit. A GUI can work well if it leans into the strengths of GUIs - discoverability of features and showing state. Magit does all of these exceptionally well. It helps that git's CLI is quite poorly designed with a lot of unintuitively named commands. How do you undo a commit? How to unstage a file? What's a stash? What's the difference between log and reflog?

With magit I've been able to do things I wouldn't bother before, like reverting small parts of hunks from past commits, doing partial staging of files (not including all changes), and dealing with stashes effectively.