Commits are snapshots of a tree. They have a list of ancestors (usually, but not always, just one). Tags are named pointers to a commit that don't change. Branches are named pointers to a commit that do change. The index is a tiny proto-commit still in progress that you "add" to before committing.
There. That's git. Want to know more? Don't read the guide, just google "how to I switch to a specific git commit without affecting my tree?", or "how do I commit only some of my changed files?", or "how to I copy this commit from another place into my current tree?".
The base abstractions are minimalist and easy. The things you want to do with them are elaborate and complicated. Learn the former, google the latter. Don't read guides.
The evidence that the git UI is awful is _overwhelming_. Yes, yes, I’m sure the people that defend it are very very very very smart, and don’t own a TV, and only listen to albums of Halloween sounds from the 1950s and are happy to type the word “shrug“ and go on to tell us how they’ve always found git transparent and easy. The fact is that brilliant people struggle with git every single day, and would almost certainly be better served by something that makes more sense.
The issues most people seem to have with git are common version control issues. Version control is actually hard, even if it's just "what has changed", once you start going beyond two users editing a file at once. When three people edit a file at the same time, there's going to be complexity when those changes need to be applied back, and that's where you start getting into branching/merging/rebasing.
Just like some people simply cannot get functional programming/object oriented programming/imperative programming to click in their head, others will never truly grasp version control. It's a paradigm of its own. People who know lots of data structures like to trivialise version control into data structures ("it's just a list of ...") but the data structures are the chosen solution, not the problem.
Another complexity issue is that git is actually pretty smart, and will fix most problems automatically in the background. Often, when you need to manually operate on a git repo, you're in a situation where git doesn't know what to do either, and leaves it up to you as the expert to fix whatever is going on. And frankly, most people who use git are nowhere close to experts. The better Git tooling gets at fixing these situations for you, the worse your situation will be once you need to manually correct anything, and the worse your perception might get.
I have no good advice for you on how to work Git better. All I can say is that I'm very productive with Jetbrains' IDE integration, others seem to prefer Visual Studio Code's git integration, and then there's the Tortoise people. Find whatever tool works best for you and hope you'll have a random epiphany one day.