I think the Git maintainers realise that and introduce commands like "restore", even though the action can be (and was for a long time) achieved with the origin

I think the Git maintainers realise that and introduce commands like "restore", even though the action can be (and was for a long time) achieved with the original command set. Also I believe "git stage" exists too: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-stage https://git-scm.com/docs/git-stage Because git commands are used in a bajillion scripts, it's very hard to remove "excessive" functionality from the old commands even when that would improve the orthogonality of the tools.