> it always seem to amount to that people bother to read the manual and understand the tool AFTER they used a VCS for years.

Perhaps, but I don't think that's true for me (or for Steve). I've contributed something like 90 patches to Git itself (mostly to the rebase code). To be fair, that was a while ago.

My impression is actually that many people who disagree with the sentiment that jj is much easier to use seem to have not read its manual :) Some of them seem to have not even tried it. So, the way it looks to me, it's usually the people who argue for jj who have a better understanding of the differences between the two tools.

Have you tried jj yourself and/or have you read some of the documentation?