That's as unfortunate as 'rm *' (and good to be aware of BTW), but doing this deliberately doesn't qualify as "normal use" for me.
There are many ways this can happen accidentally. You could be trying to checkout a branch and tab complete your way into a folder name instead. You could be typing alt/esc + . with the intent of getting last argument of previous bash command, keyboard glitches and you end up with . instead.
Just because it hasn’t happened to you yet, you shouldn’t discount the experience of others. That’s like saying you have never messed up dd yet, so there are no problems with dd’s design.
But. I once messed up badly with something else once, makefiles. I was kind of overconfident and end up screwing myself by telling something to write its output to my source files by mixing up $< and $@ somehow. Another time I accidentally overwrote a file with a simple output redirection. These two days I learned to be cautious with those commands. Same way that I always stop 2 seconds to reread my command line when I use rm.
Fool me once, shame on the tool; fool me twice, shame on me.
Well, that's what OP was referring to, but in such a "click-bait-y" way.
DESCRIPTION
Updates files in the working tree to match the version in the index or the specified tree. If no pathspec
was given, git checkout will also update HEAD to set the specified branch as the current branch.