[myme]

Yes. This one was hard for me to explain. I've discussed it with others too and might try to rephrase it again in the post.

As far as I know, there's no other git command that let's you (as easily) change which commit a local branch is pointing to without first checking it out. And "without checking it out" is the crucial part.

If, as the example tried to explain, you have a huge piece of software (think C++ monorepo) that takes ages to build, unnecessary switching of files back and forth easily messes up build tools relying on modified timestamps to determine what needs to be rebuilt. (Sure, blame the build system, but that might not be a trivial fix.)

So, in that example, the use-case is to make sure the branch is up to date before switching to it. (And you could of course argue that why don't you just create a new branch, which is also a completely valid approach).