I wonder if something is ever going to overtake git as the mainstream source control. I honestly agree with everything, git is so verbose and makes it easy to break something. The commands also have bizarre names that makes doing something specific annoying. The git docs are also a giant wall of text, just yesterday someone posted this.. I really want to try something else but it feels like there's no point because nobody would support or understand it.
Until then I guess I'll keep doing git status, git add *, git commit -m "some stuff", git push until something breaks.
libgit2 is a library that folks use to implement git functionality inside of their applications. Writing the equivalent code via libgit2 to those standard git cli operations tend to be rather long and verbose compared to the one line cli commands.
Mercurial is worth trying, and you can use it as a client to Git too! Just be aware that Mercurial's branching is not the same - but if you use Mercurial's "bookmarks", they're actually compatible with Git branches.