If your non-engineers have to deal with git you have an org or process problem. Git is pretty clear and easy to use to a competent software engineer. I'm tired of this meme that Git is hard. It doesn't get enough pushback.

I disagree that non-engineers should never have to deal with git. This may be true at large organizations, but at startups and labs, many people who are not software developers have to work with of code.

In the biotech startup I worked for, the biologists and the chemists absolutely had to deal with the code that we wrote, that was the only way we could get things done! I think maybe in very large organizations with people to spare, and large departments, and official policies, you can have rules like that. But at smaller places, you have to get scrappy and have everybody work with everything. That involves non-engineers using git!

While I strongly disagree with the conclusion of an org or process problem, I agree that basic concepts are simple and straightwordard. Plus majority (an assumption based on what I've seen) of those users use a GUI tool. GUI makes it simple to work with. A few clicks here and there and you're done. If something goes very wrong, there is usually a collegue who can help using CLI magic

> I agree that basic concepts are simple and straightwordard

I do too and I believe the problem with git is that it's somewhat usable without grasping even these basic concepts - until the day it isn't, as something goes off the beaten path and you just end up getting lost. It also doesn't really nudge you towards understanding as you keep using it; to the contrary - it happily lets you build some suboptimal mental models that are doomed to stop working at some point.

The only way to learn git well right ahead is to sit down and read. It isn't much to learn, but most people just skip this step and go straight to CLI. I can't blame them, I did the same many years ago, so it took me much longer to actually know what I'm doing than it should as well. But the thing is: I didn't know better back then, nobody told me that. Now you (the reader) know, so you have no excuse :)

What do you think the people from the biomedical engineering lab and the physics lab from the article should be doing differently?

Those people usually use GUI for that. They may even not know what CLI is.