[ryanbrunner]

git reset --hard at least has the benefit of sounding like it's going to do something scary. "git checkout ." will also completely nuke your working directory without warning, and looks benign enough that you would never expect that problem.

Which really, at the end of the day, is the real problem with git. It's not that it's inherently more dangerous, it's that the CLI is so inconsistent it can be hard to remember what you're doing, what's safe and unsafe, etc. Sometimes you need to pass "--force" for dangerous stuff, sometimes you capitalize the argument (like force deleting a branch). Sometimes "--hard" indicates that you should do the dangerous version of something. Sometimes there's not even a safety switch.