But branches are not just named pointers to a commit. If they were, then checking out the pointer would be the same as checking out the commit itself. But I can check out a commit and I can check out a branch and depending on which I've done, I'm in two different states.

Either I'm in branch state, where making a commit bumps the branch pointer and means the commit will be visible in the default log output, or I'm in "detached head" mode, and making a commit will just create a new commit somewhere that by default is hidden into I learn what a reflog is. And the kicker is: these two states look completely identical - I can have exactly the same files in my repository, and exactly the same parent commit checked out, but the hidden mode changes how git will respond to my commands.

In fairness, none of this is so difficult that you can't eventually figure it out and learn it. But it's not intuitive. This is the sort of weirdness that junior developers stumble over regularly where they accidentally do the wrong kind of checkout, make a bunch of changes, and then suddenly seem to have lost all their work.

This is one of the ways that I think the JJ model is so much clearer. You always checkout a commit. Any argument you pass to `jj new` will get resolved to a commit and that commit will be checked out. The disadvantage is that you need to manually bump the branch pointer, but the advantage is that you don't necessarily need branch pointers unless you want to share a particular branch with other people, or give it a certain name. Creating new commits on anonymous branches is perfectly normal and you'll never struggle to find commits by accidentally checking out the wrong thing.