I've completely replaced my use of --force with --force-with-lease. It does the same thing, except it will abort if the upstream branch has been updated since your last pull. This pretty much prevents the concerns about clobbering others' work.
After reading this comment about "git push --force-with-lease" in https://stackoverflow.com/a/53011907/1821348 my workflows with "git fetch" first would not work with "git push --force-with-lease", behaving as if "git push --force" was run. Theoretically - I need to do some testing here.
Thanks for the pointer into learning something new :)
