They don't behave exactly like the old ones, because they do less - which means it's harder to accidentally do the wrong thing, and it's easier to guess what it

They don't behave exactly like the old ones, because they do less - which means it's harder to accidentally do the wrong thing, and it's easier to guess what its arguments do. If you know the old ones already and don't make mistakes, it's fine not to use these, really. I consciously got the new commands into my muscle memory in case I'm pair programming or someone less familiar with Git is looking along. And yeah, knowing how Git works makes it a lot easier to understand, but it doesn't make the commands more natural. (Except perhaps knowing when you can use a commit id instead of a branch name.)