If you can afford your first instinct to be reimplementing things from scratch, your understanding of the value provided by proper version control will be limited. Some of us work with constantly changing code developed by thousands of people from all around the world in projects that 15 years ago were migrating to git and that have tons of downstreams, and are thankful for maintainers and processes that keep their commit graphs useful.

Though that said, once you're comfortable enough with git you'll be thanking yourself for commit hygiene even when coming back to your few years old single-person codebases.

In my experience, developer's work consists mostly of gaining understanding of codebases. It's like being a detective. Writing new code happens too, but not as often and it's not as impactful (and usually can and should be handled by less experienced devs wherever possible). Among the most impactful things are single line changes that took a week to write, or a few dozen lines that took months. Rewriting existing code from scratch is something that happens only as a last resort and after very careful consideration. Maintaining some basic version control hygiene makes a whole world of difference in such work. Sure, you can live without it, but you can also live without docs, comments or tests (and sometimes have to - which makes you appreciate them when they're there).