Difficulty with git basics is the least of your worries. For example pycs are fundamentally racy, it is quite possible to have a .py newer than a .pyc depending on how unlucky you were with an in-progress deployment, or some tool that never updated the .py timestamp. Python continues to execute the pyc even though the code changed, since the minimal benefit of the pyc would be rendered significantly inert should Python use any kind of strong check (instead of just comparing second-granularity stat() output) to ensure the cached bytecode matches the source. In this way, without your permission, Python silently plays undesirable code execution roulette with your computer every time it starts, for as long as you have the feature enabled.

I have lost count of the number of times I've seen someone lose an hour due to it. I can also count many instances of QA environments becoming inexplicably bricked by it. The correct fix for this requires opening the .py and hashing its content, at least doubling the amount of IO required to start a program. They were a great feature when parsing small files was noticeably slow, but this hasn't been true for almost 20 years.

It's therefore worth turning the question around: why do you think pyc files are useful?