Your straw man artist should use any of the nice frontends that work on top of git and hide its verbosity.

Yes, then it breaks because you gave your artist an SSH link to clone and LFS requires a HTTPS auth token and exits with terse errors.

Or, you need to lock your files and git doesn't really support that.

To be fair, your hypothetical is true: UE5 supports Git as a backend, you don't need to run git commands (most of the time), but in practice even in the best circumstances: Git for game dev is brittle, slow, and extremely space inefficient.

Worse still: people try pushing their "short lived branches" workflow when using Git, which is *not* how gamedev works, especially for artists. Longer lived changesets are more common. (in Perforce these are called Shelves).

> artist should use any of the nice frontends that work on top of git and hide its verbosity.

Right up until something goes fucky. You know how many times I got messaged by someone dealing with vcs going wrong for them at a late hour in the evening? If I had a nickel for every time, I wouldn't be rich, but it probably would have bought me a gallon of gas.

It's not the verbosity strictly speaking. It is the minimal level of abstraction between you and the vcs and it can hardly be helped by a 'nice frontend' when things go wrong. And they will; they always do.