I.e. too much focus has been put on data structures and not enough on the rest of the tool.
A less efficient data structure, but more focus on UX could have saved millions of man hours by this point.
I think git is more of a power-tool than people sometimes want it to be. It's more like vi than it is like MS Word, but it's ubiquity makes people wish it had an MS-word mode.
So, I think that it's hard to fault git's developers for where it is today. It's a faithful implementation of it's mission.
FWIW, I have never used a tool with better documentation than git in 2020 (it hasn't always had good --help documentation, but it absolutely does today).
> The counter argument would be that git is the poster-child of poor UX, which could be blamed on the fact that it exposes too much of its internal data structure and general inner-workings to the user.
I agree with you that the UI is inconsistent, however I don't agree that it's the result of git exposing too much of the internal data structure.