It is not simple like a hammer, but imo the bar for being a software engineer is being intelligent enough to be able to understand it well enough to do things with it, since it is a tool of the trade.

jj is far simpler and more powerful at the same time. There is absolutely no reason anyone should waste time learning git in 2026

reason: not use a tool whose name collides with million things

Not a reason to use git. Git has been a common word since long before the git version control system was created: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/git

not for 95% of what people will use it for IMO

initializing a repo, staging files, adding them to the changeset, commiting then pushing those changes are easy to do. solving merge conflicts is a little complicated but IDEs make that much easier to do.

Agreed, the amount of stuff checkout can do is crazy. And the concepts of hard and soft resets mixed with garbage collection make deletion non trivial to understand. Or using interactive rebase to variously remove, squash, and rewrite commits.

Fundamentally git is conceptually complex in a way that almost no other tool is. Others might have scarier syntax to newcomers but rarely expose the same level of underlying complexity.

Version control is simple for the typical user. Git is a terrible tool though and doesn't properly abstract the complexity that should be hidden away from users. Even still, the typical user only needs to know how to clone, stage, commit, push, and merge (I'd like to add branch, but git doesn't have real branches, so I guess tag which should be an advanced topic nobody needs)