I have to say I thought something similar to your sentiment.
When I interview people for software engineering roles in 2019 who haven't bother to learn Git or struggle to understand it's use-case, basics and relatively simple to use interface I can quite easily use this to make some important assumptions about the candidate. The most important being that maybe software engineering isn't the right career choice for that person, at least not yet.
Is there room for improvement? Sure, but let's make sure where ever we go, it's to a better place, not a worse one.
Another thing about this is the assumption that a candidate has to be a Git ninja. If a dev can't read the Git documentation and narrow down the most important use cases, then it should definitely trigger a red flag. You don't need all the features to be productive. Unless you are an edge case, you can probably do most of what you need to get done with these six commands:
branch
checkout
add
commit
pull
push
Reading and understanding the documentation for those six core commands isn't a big investment, and it will pay off if you're doing software or documentation development.
When I interview people for software engineering roles in 2019 who haven't bother to learn Git or struggle to understand it's use-case, basics and relatively simple to use interface I can quite easily use this to make some important assumptions about the candidate. The most important being that maybe software engineering isn't the right career choice for that person, at least not yet.
Is there room for improvement? Sure, but let's make sure where ever we go, it's to a better place, not a worse one.