A lot of the discussion focuses on differences from git and how it uses the git storage strategy under the hood. Honestly, I think you should just ignore all of that. Don't think about git. Here's a workflow that'll get you through your daily usage:

On a clean repo:

    $ jj
    The working copy has no changes.
    Working copy  (@) : abcdef a53ff9ba (empty) (no description set)
    Parent commit (@-): qrstuv 4bc1bf34 the last thing you did

Make some changes.

    $ jj # shows status (new, modified, deleted, moved, etc.)

If you're satisfied with your changes,

    $ jj commit -m "made changes"
    

Now `jj` is back to clean state. You don't need to do `jj new` to continue working linearly. Just make your next changes and commit. If you realize that you messed something up, fix it, then `jj squash` and it gets incorporated into that last commit.

You only `jj new -r lmnop` if you want to do some work based on the state of the codebase at revision lmnop, rather than the previous revision, which is a figurative branch. No need to manually create and name branches.

As for git history: just do `git log` to see what's actually going on. It's a clean history reflecting your `jj commit`s. You're not going to see all of the stuff the jj machinery does.