It does sometimes happen that something in there just breaks and isn't easy to recover. But it can also be a matter of (inexperienced) devs just deciding, fuck it, I won't try to merge it, I'll just copy my changes elsewhere and throw away the repo.
I have never had git get into a state I cannot get out of. Even if that is a reset, checkout or clean. And those are very rare. How are people breaking things so often.
Learn the tools you use daily, it saves you a lot of headache in thelong term.
As for how to merge, yes, one should learn that. The problem is that the complexity of the code changes adds on top of whatever insecurities you might still have with Git.
I did put "inexperienced" in braces there, because even as an experienced dev, merges are sometimes just not worth doing. In that case, you could just checkout the branch a second time, but well, still not that different.
That should not break things though. Maybe get a merge conflict that you need to sortout at worst. This is essentially the constant state of working with other people on a project.
But it can also be a matter of (inexperienced) devs just deciding, fuck it, I won't try to merge it, I'll just copy my changes elsewhere and throw away the repo.
Pretty sure that's actually it. Git has a learning curve and, for example, some naive rebase not working out as intended can be scary if you don't know what you're doing.
People inexperienced with git can get stuck after doing some funky checkout / rebase stuff. If you don't know your way around git so well, I guess this is the obvious solution.
I've been doing this yesterday. Not because Git broke, but since Intellij kept pulling invalid configs from the cache, and that was based on some kind of path identifier it seemed.