Never understood why this is such a trope. There's very little you can't recover in git (basically, only changes you never committed in the first place).
I always use git status to check what is appropriate before doing anything else, since the right thing to do can sometimes be different, like after using git rebase when a break command was used vs when a squash command resulted in a conflict.
To be fair that's not the entire story, since you need to actually resolve the conflicts first, which is slightly scary since your worktree will be broken while you do it and your Linter will be shouting at you.
You may also want a dedicated merge tool that warns you before accidentally commiting a conflict and creating a broken commit.
Oh and non trivial resolutions may or may not create an evil merge which may or may not be desirable depending on which subset of git automation features you use.
Using git status often is definitely good advice though.
Branching version control was definitely a “they have played us for absolute fools” moment. Especially after all our projects ended up as isolated branches on isolated microservice repositories so basically none of our code was being integrated, let alone continuously. Good for full-remote open source projects where a central admin team has to police submissions though.
Git is great. Git is Complicated. But assuming you have a protected master branch that requires PRs and will detect merge conflicts before attempting to merge, it's not really dangerous. It is however frustrating.