And anyway... it's trivial to fix. If you still have the commit ID of the tip of the branch before the pull, go back to that. If not, look it up in the reflog. If that's too much of a hassle, list the commits you only have locally, stash any changes, reset to the origin/the_branch and cherry-pick your commits again and/or apply the stash.

I really embraced git once I understood that whatever I did locally, it's most of the time relatively easy to recover from cock-ups. And it's really difficult to lose work from the moment you've added it to a (local) commit or stashed it.

I do understand that git is daunting however, and there is plenty where I think the defaults are bad. Too often I've seen merge commits where someone merged a the remote of a branch into the local copy of the same branch, or even this on main. And once this stuff gets pushed it's neigh impossible to go back.