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.

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.

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.