> What was holding me back turned out to be the fact that git has too much magic
Considering jj is built on top of git, doesn't that mean jj has even more magic? That's like saying React is too magical so we should use Next.js instead (which is built on React).
Maybe you just mean that jj has a more intuitive CLI than git?
Jj uses git's data model, that doesn't mean it uses git commands for everything under the hood. Creating a commit with jj doesn't move the branch tag automatically, whereas git does. That's what confused me with git, it didn't expose the internals enough, so even though I had read about the data structures, it never clicked what was changed when, because git did it under the hood.