My feeling is that new users shouldn't be taught about branches in their local repo at all. Typical cloud-based git{hub,lab}/gerrit/etc.. workflows generally store all branches worth talking about on remote systems anyway.

I find I don't ever bother with managing local branches for anything in my own workflows. I just git-reset --hard to bounce between fetched copies of upstream branches as needed. Stuff I need to work on for more than a few commits in an afternoon gets pushed to a remote branch regularly anyway as part of general safe development hygiene.