alt Hacker NewsDon't get me wrong, git has some accidental complexity (as will any tool introduced, including what I am seeing with jj). But a lot of it is just incidental complexity. It doesn't matter how much lipstick you put on it, at the end of the day some concepts need to be learned.
Did you mean inherent complexity instead of incidental complexity?
I think the inherently complex things in git are (1) the content-accessible object store, snapshots, plus the merkel tree approach to keeping track of commits and parenthood, (2) merges, rebases, and resolving conflicts between two different changes with a common ancestor, (3) possibly syncing commits between different remotes, although I think Git's approach adds accidental complexity to the problem as well.
Everything else is a question of the user interface: how you choose to show a commit, how you choose to update the project files, how you choose to let people create new commits, etc. And I think the Git CLI is a poor user interface in a lot of places. There are a lot of features which are really powerful but difficult to use, whereas actually they could be just as powerful but far more intuitive to use.
In fairness, this is no slight to the Git developers - they are improving a lot of that interface all of the time. And finding a simpler interface is often a lot more hard work than finding the complicated interface, and I don't think I would have figured out how to create something like jj until I'd seen it before.