I feel like you do need a bit of rigor, especially because rebases and the like often don't do what you intuitively want, leading to merge conflicts over and over again when trying to clean things up.
Even small stuff like not knowing to enable rerere means that rebases have incidental complexity compared to, for example, outright recreating commits in another spot.
I disagree with most people about mercurial being "better" (I love my staging area), but doing stuff with git in practice can be super duper fiddly. I've found it's much nicer to do the right thing with stuff like magit though. I bet there is a great UI that is yet to be built for most people that makes it easier to do stuff like "updating old commits" or other things that you end up having to do through rebases.
Even small stuff like not knowing to enable rerere means that rebases have incidental complexity compared to, for example, outright recreating commits in another spot.
I disagree with most people about mercurial being "better" (I love my staging area), but doing stuff with git in practice can be super duper fiddly. I've found it's much nicer to do the right thing with stuff like magit though. I bet there is a great UI that is yet to be built for most people that makes it easier to do stuff like "updating old commits" or other things that you end up having to do through rebases.