A lot of this I can't really speak to, and for some things I can see the point - I use stashes to follow almost exactly the no-staging-area workflow - but in ot

A lot of this I can't really speak to, and for some things I can see the point - I use stashes to follow almost exactly the no-staging-area workflow - but in other places this suffers at least a little from being a generalization from one example. In particular, named branches significantly reduce friction in my day-to-day work. I often have PRs for multiple smallish tickets in flight simultaneously, working on the code for each ticket while I wait for review on the others. This means that branches generally live for about eight hours and I care about maybe three of them at any given time, a different set every day. Invocations are stable, named refs fit in cache and my CLI does fuzzy LRU to improve that further, and I can bounce to the current code for a given ticket/PR at almost the speed of thought. By contrast, the "view the log and copy-paste a hash" workflow makes me cringe - I have to inspect the log every time I want to bounce to the code for a PR, and the invocation to go to a PR changes four times a day? I agree that that that makes sense if you have thirty long-running PRs open at any given time and you don't have brainpower to remember branches anyway, and that's very reasonable for a big open-source project, but that's not all use cases.