To be fair, with git, specifically, it's a good idea to at least clone for backup before things like major merges. There are lots of horror stories from people losing work to git workflow issues and I'd rather be ridiculed as an idiot who is afraid of "his tools" (as if I have anything like a choice when using git) and won't learn them properly than lose work thanks to a belief that this thing behaves in a way which can actually be learned and followed safely.
A special case of this is git rebase after which you "can" access the original history in some obscure way until it's garbage-collected; or you could clone the repo before the merge and then you can access the original history straightforwardly and you decide when to garbage-collect it by deleting that repo.
A special case of this is git rebase after which you "can" access the original history in some obscure way until it's garbage-collected; or you could clone the repo before the merge and then you can access the original history straightforwardly and you decide when to garbage-collect it by deleting that repo.