Agreed. Are the people defending it forgetting how often beginners end up in seemingly arcane states and need to just check out the branch again to return to sanity?
When learning to program, you end up in arcane states. When learning languages, you end up in arcane states. Even when learning how to drive, I ended up in arcane states.
Obviously a bit of hyperbole, but when hopefully when you learn it and end up in weird states, you have a companion helping you to correct course.
From my experience as sysadmin the people having problem with it also highly correlate with people that just chmod 777 on server if something doesn't work and they don't understand why...