i am no apologetic for the messy git UI. But i also know that any competent software engineer can be given a sufficient understanding / mental model of the basic git way of doing things in 1-2 hours, after which they can Google for the exact syntax of the commands they need (if they are doing complicated things). i feel that if they are unwilling to invest even that much time, then they are going to waste an eternity on endless tools and GUIs.

it's like tar or rsync or ffmpeg. Yes, it's hard to keep track of all the command line flags etc. but thanks to the internet we don't need to. it's far more useful to understand the underlying concepts.