This is a disgusting, harmful take. You should really step back and rethink your assumptions here. Git is a tool that’s meant to make things easier. It’s complex enough, though, that it’s a stumbling block for a lot of folks for a workflow that really shouldn’t be so complicated.
If you intuitively grok how git works, that’s great. I’m going to guess you probably don’t really use it in any challenging or new situations and are just comfortable with your particular workflow. But maybe you do have that mastery level over this one tool in your code management system.
But guess what, other folks, true genius folks, either can’t or don’t have the mental bandwidth to learn every nook and cranny of this tool. If you don’t recognize that, you are willfully dismissing a lot of really smart people because their brains don’t work the same way yours does. But when you do that you are weakening yourself and your own capabilities.
So step back and re-assess your take here. It’s wrong, and it’s toxic to your own outlook as well as those around you.
It's evident that you think requiring basic competence is toxic, but you don't really compel me to feel differently. You have told me what I think is the case is toxic, wrong, disgusting and harmful. I now know you feel strongly about this.
I don't hugely feel like seeing things from your point of view because the only thing you've really told me that might change my mind is that you lose people when you require a basic amount of capability. I'm sorry to hear that this grievously wounds you on an emotional level, but I don't see that as a loss.
Not the person you're responding to, but I have my own two cents:
Saying "basic competence" is horrifically abusing language here. Git is a glorified save/share/undo tool, demanding people spend several days reading the manual is an absolute caricature and yet you're seriously saying that.
The reason people are mad at you is that people have lived experience of the interface sucking and failing to do the job an interface does - convey via context what it does and you're basically blaming them for wanting to fix the problem they've experienced instead of sucking it up and Being A Real Man and solving problems they don't have as a workaround for the tool failing to solve problems they do have.
And it's not like Git's interface problems are subtle. It's an absolute joke, and you're not even claiming it's an acceptable interface so much as rejecting the entire concept of user interfaces at all. I'm not sure how to explain how utterly infuriating that is.
You're saying "you're doing it wrong, so I don't care" while simultaneously complaining that some of the solutions could hurt other peoples' use-cases.
What is the correct response here? Reject their own memories and emotions and yield to your blame, or call you a willfully-oblivious fuckhead?
You're not the first one to say that it's hard to use right and I agree with that. This is true for a lot of powerful tools. At the end of the day, what is intuitive is what you have used a lot. If you're using a tool that fits an entirely different paradigm from what you are normally used to, it's going to be unintuitive. It's fair to say this frustrates everyone, especially in the beginning.
All that being said, this is not a reason to then take the next step and claim that basic competence in what is today an essential tool is optional. It is necessary and to work well you must know it well, otherwise the frustration you point out will be part of your life every day. As opposed to something that you live through and say goodbye to.
The fact that everyone is taking this as toxic or willfully oblivious is as far as I'm concerned infantile. It has nothing to do with "being a real man" (whatever that means to you), it has something to do with having the maturity to realise that you are making your own problems.
That is not to say we cannot build a better tool. Perhaps we can! Up until this point I have not seen it done without losing something else in turn.
If you intuitively grok how git works, that’s great. I’m going to guess you probably don’t really use it in any challenging or new situations and are just comfortable with your particular workflow. But maybe you do have that mastery level over this one tool in your code management system.
But guess what, other folks, true genius folks, either can’t or don’t have the mental bandwidth to learn every nook and cranny of this tool. If you don’t recognize that, you are willfully dismissing a lot of really smart people because their brains don’t work the same way yours does. But when you do that you are weakening yourself and your own capabilities.
So step back and re-assess your take here. It’s wrong, and it’s toxic to your own outlook as well as those around you.