Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'll use git a hundred times a day, every day, for the rest of your career. It's easily worth the hour it'll take to learn it properly.
It's not a given you will use it for the rest of your career. As two examples, neither Google nor Facebook use git.
Mercurial works great, has a sane CLI and can both manipulate and interoperate with git repos.
Many of the tools mentioned, at their core, are manipulating the same DAG data structures.