No the logic is not circular, and the advice to learn git is a good one.
It may seem paradoxical at first to you, but is true (as are many things in this profession). Another paradoxical advice like that, is to learn vim, or emacs, but I digress.
Git does not suck - as any other tool it, it just has strenghts and weaknesses (for example working with very large binary assets is its main weakness).
The UX of most common git CLI operations is clean actually, as they are fast, and you do not need many arcane options (although they are there, and are documented well, for people who read...).
If you screw up something, you just use the reflog to fix the state of your repo in most cases. Even if you can not (or do not want to), the troubleshooting is still easy - you can always do a fresh clone from your remote repository in a new folder and copy what you want there.
You're assuming that I haven't read about Git. I've read a ton about it and its internal data structures. And regarding your digression, I'm a vim user.
Regarding Git, Git does suck. It does the job Linus designed it to do, but that job is not most software engineers across the world need it to do.
In smaller or in corporate shops, Subversion was almost adequate and several bad implementation details, mostly related to branching, led to its demise. So that world needed Subversion++, not Git.
In the FAANG world, there's basically no company that uses Git as-is. It's strength/weaknesses aka tradeoffs aren't good enough for them.
Git won because tech is a popularity contest and people in our domain like to do a lot of virtue signalling ("this tool is hard to use, I use it, so I'm special/cool").
My response was to your sarcastic mini dialog above my reply. Do not try to read other peoples minds - it is impossible, and if you really want to, you can simply ask.
>> It does the job Linus designed it to do, but that job is not most software engineers across the world need it to do.
Speak for yourself, you are not most software engineeers.
>>In smaller or in corporate shops, Subversion was almost adequate ...
I have administered SVN profesionally for several years (2005-2007), and was paid to unfuck screwups made by other developers using it (which many times involved restoring from incremental hourly backups done on the SVN server side). Dealing and helping others with their git problems is many times easier.
The FAANG world (which I had to google just now) I imagine has unique requirements (many teams that must coordinate, super gigantic legacy source code base), and the resources to do whatever they want (money, humans to develop and maintain tools and do research). For them, the integration pain from managing multiple smaller repos may be significant. Outside this world however, teams are more independant and the source code size is much much smaller (even for legacy projects).
>> Git won because tech is a popularity contest
You have a point here, but this factor (and network effects in general) is just inertia, and does not explain why git won, given that for example SVN or Perforce had such a head start (in tooling, and in mindshare), and there were other distributed contenders like mercurial and darcs and BitKeeper developed at aproximately the same time, and even earlier. It won in my opinion because it was simply superior tech - faster, good enough and very very easy to get started.
Git won because it is technically superior (IMHO, but I've used most other VCS only sparingly). It's well designed, flexible, and fast. Apart from a command-line interface with some unfortunately named options and a "big file issue" (that has never been a problem for me), I don't think there is anything wrong with it.
What do you think is wrong about it? Or have you only "read a ton" but never used it for a while? In the latter case, I suggest you start with the things I mentioned above, and make good use of "git reflog" as suggested by somebody else. If you know git reflog, "delete tree and clone a fresh copy" is not a thing anymore.
> In the FAANG world, there's basically no company that uses Git as-is. It's strength/weaknesses aka tradeoffs aren't good enough for them.
"Git sucks, the UX is atrocious, I don't want to spend half my life learning a tool that shouldn't even need that much hand holding."
"Learn Git!!!"