Most projects do not need the complex merging capabilities of git. I've found that simply structuring the workflow around trunk based development with linear history works the best: short lived feature branches that get rebased/squashed/committed and the tip of main is always deployable. It avoids dealing with all of the bullshit that comes with long-lived branches and migrating changes between them. This also requires structuring the work itself if you have a larger team so that if you are all working on the same system, avoid crossing the streams (draw some boundaries) to keep dependencies between branches at a minimum. When it starts getting into stacked patches, that's a good sign you have a kink in the review pipeline somewhere and this complexity can go away with some managering. Git is as complex as you want it to be, and pretty easy to keep it simple