I am aware that beej's guides are typically quite comprehensive, but the vast nuances of git truly eluded me until this.
I guess Jujitsu would wind up being a much slimmer guide, or at least one that would be discoverable largely by humans?
The universe doesn't owe you an easy 10 minute video solution to everything, it's an annoying educational expectation that people seem to have developed. Some things are just that difficult and you have to learn them regardless.
I can teach someone who has never even heard of source control how to use Perforce in about 10 minutes. They will never shoot themselves in the foot and they will never lose work. There are certainly more advanced techniques that require additional training. But the basics are very easy.
Git makes even basic things difficult. And allows even experts to shoot their face off with a rocket launcher.
Git sucks. The best tool doesn't always win. If MercurialHub had been founded instead of GitHub we'd all be used a different tool. Alas.
1) The fact that "fetch" doesn't happen automatically in the "chrome" commands.
2) naive use of "git merge" results in history that's a cyclopean horror. For example, caring about the "left" and "right" parents of a commit.
3) rerere isn't enabled by default so if you're merging from upstream constantly you're having to re-resolve same conflicts, every time is an opportunity to screw up.
4) a culture of keeping a clean history but cleaning history is destructive and painful for other users of the same branch.
5) git merge merges from local (stale) branch by default, so when merging from upstream to get new commits you have to remember to `git merge origin/main` instead of `git merge main`. Also see (1).
6) using submodules. At all.