Protecting branches is indeed very important. I make errors all the time when screwing around. It helps enormously being restricted to just messing up one's feature branches. Many other changes can be done via the GUI with PRs and the various kind of controlled merge and rebase strategies they support, like Merge, Rebase + Merge, FF-only Merge, Squash merge, etc.
It's also a security feature. If you have a repo with a lot of developers working on it, you need to be sure they absolutely cannot slip in code with nobody noticing, or trigger CI/CD and compromise build secrets or even production.
