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.