The common stance is that people try to use said API without reading the docs. Like the first paragraphs of the git-rebase description
Transplant a series of commits onto a different starting point. You can also use git rebase to reorder or combine commits: see INTERACTIVE MODE below for how to do that.
And then later
Rebasing interactively means that you have a chance to edit the commits which are rebased. You can reorder the commits, and you can remove them (weeding out bad or otherwise unwanted patches).
Those are obvious IF you know what a commit is and how they relate to each other (a DAG). But most people don’t. Instead, their only knowledge is what they’ve seen the operation do (tutorial or youtube video).
Git itself has a glossary[0] of the terms used in the docs.
plenty of models do fine with assuming a flat earth. git is an incredibly competent swiss army knife for building VCS but I'm not convinced it's the best we can ever do (nor we have ever done) for the simple linear history we expect from your usual corpo crud.