In my eyes all you did with this comment is join the people your parent poster is arguing against; you kind of just reiterated the stance they don't like. Not sure how constructive such a comment is.
> it's the people familiar with "what does pull --rebase really do?" that don't get into trouble and/or can get themselves back out of trouble
Absolutely not my experience. No small amount of people who seem to be doing more with GIT than me regularly get into trouble. Has been the case in at least 7 companies so far. Check your selection bias.
> and the ones who always type the same command regardless of the situation that have problems.
People like you forget that we use tools to make our lives easier. Tools. Not a whole damned ecosystem of dyslexic scripts that can't make up their mind even on a common CLI switch convention...
> Learn your tools, inside and out.
I am not paid to know GIT inside out. I am paid to deliver and fix code and to not step on other people's feet. I am aware that the second part is what many deem to be an ideal case for knowing GIT inside out but not to me and not to almost all devs I ever worked with. I do indeed want to issue one command and be done with it.
GIT does a poor job of bringing remote changes into your branch, for example. As other commenters have pointed out, it can do much better, like detect concurrent identical changes -- which is something that happens often in big teams, people just swing by a module and fix a trivial bug and include it in a bigger PR. You can argue until the end of days that's not a good dev team practice but in the end these things still do happen and this supposedly amazing tool is supposed to handle it. Guess it isn't designed for that?
> It's possible you're "holding it wrong" in some obvious way
"Obvious", sure. As if I care what an index, staging area, reflog etc. are. I don't. But GIT's team has been stubborn. This article seem to show some desire to improve UX, which might go contrary to what you feel what GIT users should do. ;) So I'd say even their team is starting to recognize some problems and are working to address them.
GIT's problem is super classical in all dev tooling. The creator(s) directly exposed the underlying data structures and are putting the onus on the user to learn them inside and out. As opposed to actually making a good UX.
Stuff like, say, "git sync" (which should do "fetch" + try to merge/rebase main branch with yours) should have been no-brainer right from the start.