From my teaching experience it could be a fear to do something wrong. I've come from SVN and ClearCase where doing wrong was quite a trivial thing. And Git relaxed me a lot. Knowing only push/pull makes actual changes and you have reflog to revert any possible mess is a big relief.
I don't think I have ever met a beginner of git that hasn't fucked up their repo to a state where the effort to get back is more than just redo everything. In the beginning the fear is paralyzing and it is not without reason.
For sure it is recoverable, but not to a beginner.
I do agree that fear is a very important factor. I disagree that it was easier to do things wrong with SVN.
The times I got in a weird state with SVN was usually related to a merge. But it was the clunkiness of the tool and not fear of loosing anything or not having a way out. Last resort was just to do the merge manually. No risk to it, just tedious work.
This is definitely why I hate git. It really is possible to lose your work by doing a a bad reset (and really the vocabulary of hard, soft and mixed resets is a blatant cop out from coming up with meaningful terms). Or by checking out another branch and not committing or stagsing all your files - yes I know this is a no no but it's trivially easy to do and git would be better if it just had to get them back. If only there was just a 'revert whatever I just did to git' even if what I did was destructive. Or better, if only navigating my git history was as easy as an undo tree in Emacs. Every change seems frought and so for me and probably a lot of others it becomes easily very stressful.
