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I think what people usually mean is "scary" or "it's easy to mess up". Git is very easy to use until you mess up, then it can become complicated, and certain actions may have devastating consequences.

Two examples from recent memory:

Someone merged the develop branch into their branch, then changed their mind and reverted the merge commit specifically (i.e. reversing all the incoming changes), then somehow merged all of this into the develop branch, undoing weeks of work without noticing. I had to go in and revert the revert to undo the mistake. Yes they messed up, but these things happen with enough people and time.

Another very interesting issue that happened to a less technical person on the team was that their git UI somehow opened the terminal in the wrong folder. They then tried to run some command which made git suggest to run 'git init', creating another git repo in that wrong location. Fast forward some days and we had an issue where people had to clean their repos, so I was in a call with the person helping them run the clean command. The UI opened the wrong location again, I helped them put in the command and it started cleaning. The problem was that this git repo was essentially at the top level on their disk, and since was a fresh repo every single file was considered a new file so it tried to delete EVERYTHING on their disk. This was of course mostly my fault for not running git status before the clean command, but this potential scenario was definitely not on my mind.

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$ git checkout HEAD $ git commit --allow-empty -m "_" $ git checkout master $ git reflog a91 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) HEAD@{0}: checkout: moving from b94 to master b94 HEAD@{1}: commit: _ 28d (origin/feature, feature) HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from feature to @

68e HEAD@{15}: rebase (finish): returning to refs/heads/feature 68e HEAD@{16}: rebase (pick): message #6 7ff HEAD@{17}: rebase (pick): message #5 797 HEAD@{18}: rebase (pick): message #4 776 HEAD@{19}: rebase (pick): message #3 c7d HEAD@{20}: rebase (pick): message #2 f10 HEAD@{21}: rebase (pick): message #1 c0d HEAD@{22}: rebase (start): checkout @~6 a7c HEAD@{100}: rebase (reword): message ... 3b1 HEAD@{229}: rebase (reset): '3b1' message ... 4a4 HEAD@{270}: rebase (continue): message ...

--update-refs, --no-update-refs Automatically force-update any branches that point to commits that are being rebased. Any branches that are checked out in a worktree are not updated in this way. If the configuration variable rebase.updateRefs is set, then this option can be used to override and disable this setting.