As a user, I see absolutely no reason to know the internal workings of Git. It supposedly offers a service, which is tracking and recording changes to files. In a way, it's a very able SaveAs/Open command and also offering some way of altering the recorded history.

How it's done internally, as much as it's remarkable, is just an implementation detail. The fact that users are repeatedly being referred to docs/books, points to conceptual inconsistencies or mismatches in the intended application contexts.

As a user I operate with directories and files. Now version control also introduces a time-component, which is versions (and version of a version aka branch) and some kind of history/timeline/journal/log.

Why would a branch have a "head" and "base", isn't parent/child concept expressive already? Why "ref", if we've got "version" already? Why "stage", "index", "cache"? Why "cherry-pick" if we've got "patch"? Etc.