It does sometimes happen that something in there just breaks and isn't easy to recover. But it can also be a matter of (inexperienced) devs just deciding, fuck it, I won't try to merge it, I'll just copy my changes elsewhere and throw away the repo.

People inexperienced with git can get stuck after doing some funky checkout / rebase stuff. If you don't know your way around git so well, I guess this is the obvious solution.

I've been doing this yesterday. Not because Git broke, but since Intellij kept pulling invalid configs from the cache, and that was based on some kind of path identifier it seemed.

Gradle!

Fucking gradle. I do config stuff, rerun gradle error here, I fix the error rerun gradle: sth. Violation error.

Ok intellij invalidate chaches and restart.... Still same error.

Fine I'll do it again

git add. 
git commit -m "stuff"
git push

rm -rf repo
git clone repo