Once you start adding more than one developer to a Mercurial repo you need to know how Mercurial works, so I don't see how this is much different. In fact adding remotes to Mercurial was a much harder process last time I used it.
We tried git too and lost our changes inevitably. Our git knowledge is to be blamed but blame git CLI too! It is not easy to learn at all. After 12 years of git, I see articles with tips and guides on using git. That kind of hints how esoteric git CLI can be.
For folks like me, who spent their evenings in high-school screwing around with obscure linux distros and have been scouring badly written man pages trying to fix their computer for half their life, the little stuff is forgivable, and a lot of the big stuff is pretty good. But it's a shame how many inessential hurdles there are. See also:
https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/
Biggest piece of advice for not losing data: learn about git-reflog and git-reset before doing anything that modifies history. Nothing is destroyed, even by "scary" operations like rebase, so it's always possible to recover something, but you need to know how to find stuff.
I do some contract work for a university, where we have lots of student interns going through. We use GitHub, and we rarely rebase or cherry-pick, basically because while I could spend a bunch of time trying to teach git to new interns that will be gone in 4 months, It seems like a more efficient use of time to just occasionally put up with a messy history.