i guess your difficulty is that half the commands i can write off hand and the other half i cant, and i only really care to understand the parts of the data model that i actually touch.

like, i dont really need to know all the stash details when i only stash one thing at a time, very temporarily

i also dont really care to know all the origin and remote definitions stuff when i only touch it once per project or so.

i could certainly draw graphs of what different git repos look like, but what makes it salient to know the rest of the details unless im actually building git itself? if youre using every git feature regularly you're probably doing something wrong

Your comment hits the nail on what I wrote.

I couldn’t care less about stashing commands.

I do care about … if someone understands origins and not by definition because developer needs to know what is his local version and what is on the server and how those two affect each other. Bonus points if they understand server is not special in Git and their colleagues copy on their laptop can be origin as well.

Drawing graphs of what different repos look like? That’s irrelevant.

Irrelevant if one understands that Git uses DAG and is content addressable store.

You see someone might know those hard words but when working daily with Git reasoning about rebase or merge, cleaning up their own work with interactive rebase, making pull/merge requests or resolving conflicts it is much easier if one knows what is local what is remote and how Git stores data.

You also learn it once. In my 15 years of using Git I basically didn’t learn much new commands but having mental model of how it works was my tool to fix any problems other people had. Knowing commands or definitions is secondary.

> like, i dont really need to know all the stash details when i only stash one thing at a time, very temporarily

If I were hiring, I would care about whether you can `git help stash`, skim over it (bonus points for actually using the pager competently) and figure out what you need to do.