Like what?

VCS should be trivial push-button activity (and _is_ except with Git). There is no added value making a thing far less usable than could be. This is not git’s fault - it is what it is. But it is incomprehensible industry selected it as it’s de facto vcs.

Give an example of an "action that should be a trivial push-button activity" that requires "incomprehensible command line character soup".

All of them. A command line should not be the default option.

Again, this is not to bash Git. It's a bash on the industry for selecting tool that requires engineers to spend time and effort on non-value adding part of their work rather than offering a solution so simple you would most of the time not even think about it.

If the existence of a book speaks volumes about how bad something is or is not, I have some bad news for you about what's inside libraries. What beloved subject doesn't have a plethora of books written about it?

Exactly. VCS is part of an industrial process. It's not supposed to be implemented with a thin wrapper to a database whose node structure you need to rummage through.

The software analogue would be that in order to use the platform default List and Dictionary data structures you would need to manually manage the links between the data nodes.

Or to use text editor you would occasionally tweak the rope datastructure or equivalent. Etc.