Beej's Guide to Git

I can't help but feel that Git has completely missed the forest through the trees that you can make a 30+ part guide explaining how to use it.

Eh, yes and no.

Git porcelain stuff's plenty good for probably 95% of users. `rebase -i` comes with a guide on which commands do what, and you could write a couple of paragraphs about how to format `git log`'s output with your own preferences and tradeoffs -- and porcelain usually includes stuff as eclectic as `git gc`, `git fsck`, and `git rev-parse` by most accounts.

Git plumbing's definitely a bit more obscure, and does a bunch of stuff on its own that you can't always easily do with porcelain commands because they're optimized for the common use cases.

TL;DR: while Git's big (huge even), a lot of what it provides is way off the beaten path for most devs.

not my experience - almost always some edge case leads me to a git rabbit hole

tldr: even if you never plan to use anything advanced, you’ll end up in some weird situation where you need to do something even if you’re in the “95% of the users”

no shade, yes ofc you “could this, could that” to make things work and we have been stuck with this for so long that an alternative doesn’t even seem plausible

I can't remember the last time I ended up in a weird situation, I stick to basic options with init,clone,fetch,checkout,branch,commit,rebase,remote,log,stash,cherry-pick,blame,config.

It did take maybe a year or so to develop the mental model of the how commands map to the underlying structure of commits, and another few years to avoid footguns (like always "push --force-with-lease").

So I think it is probably too complicated and would be happy to switch to a better alternative if one comes up, but what seems really implausible to me is going back to the bad old days of SVN.

You are using Git in a non-automated way, basically, as a substitute for rsync (you never edit history, you only append to it, you don't deal with a possibility of multiple remotes, you don't deal with modular projects and you don't automate anything).

At least, this is what it looks like from your own description. This is, probably, what most people do with it most of the time. And the weird corners will be found when they need to automate things, or when they want to deal with modular repositories, or history rewrites. These aren't everyday tasks / not for everyone on the team, but, these things do happen, especially in smaller teams, where there's no dedicated infra person or group these can be delegated to.