Here in the real world if you fuck up your local repo by running commands you don't understand there isn't a "git expert" to come by and fix it for you, in the same way if you make a VM and fuck up your local machine there isn't going to be a "linux expert" to come in and explain how to fix what you did wrong.

Part of the benefit of the tool is that you can blow everything away and restart. It's distributed, which means you CAN fuck up your local copy and there are no consequences. It's been years since I've had a repository be in an "unrecoverable" state and part of that is actually taking the time to understand what I'm doing as opposed to just crossing my fingers and hoping shit works.

The fact that other version control systems don't even have some of the power features git has is a big reason git is so popular.

Again, if you don't understand the more complicated commands, don't use them (although you should- they are incredibly powerful and worth learning about). If your team is forcing some bizarre workflow on newer developers that involves using filter-branch and cherry-pick all over the place without good reason, that's an organizational issue, not one with git.