With Git everyone has their own personal repository on their machine. Like you could “break away” and be “the central repo and people could start syncing from you. So like remember it’s all “self contained repos” you’re just syncing changes from “somewhere upstream”

Make sure you’re merging changes from your upstream regularly.

When two people change the same area of code, you get a merge conflict.

So sync often and merge often. Don’t wait until you’re ready to push to merge upstream or you’re gonna have a bad time.

I'm not sure of your exact problem, so this might not be helpful, but learning about the reflog in Git accelerated my learning Git because I was no longer fearful of getting my repo into such a state, as I knew the reflog would get me out of trouble, i.e. I could try most any old Git op knowing that if I stuffed things up, I wasn't doomed to re-clone.

The Git Parable [0] was the thing that gave me my "aha!" moment with git. It may work for you too

[0]: https://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.ht...

i always pull up the docs on rebasing and do that every time