Coming from CVS and ClearCase it took me some time to adopt to Git. The fact that it was distributed was confusing at first, for example, because I thought that would cause chaos. But the way we used it was actually not “that distributed”. But once I understood how it worked, not doing DVCS was “the wrong way” immediately.
How did it change how I think about version control? Not much? The goals are still the same. It only does many things better than previous centralized tools.
When DVCS came up and became popular, I used Git and Bzr.
At work, we used subversion. In one project, we had one SVN repository in our office and the customer had one in their office. A colleage had created a sync util. We regularly synced all history into an external hard drive, drove to the customer, and merged it there. Required a thorough and checklist process, potentially conflict resolution, and changelog generating for the big merge commit. Then drive back to the office, and merge back there.
Of course sometimes you used remote desktop to hotfix changes in their code base. Meaning you’d now have the change in two places as different commits.
Anyway, I’ve never found Git difficult. I used it, learned and understood it, and it’s consistent. I know enough “internals”/technical details to understand and use it well and without confusion.