Preaching to the choir here I suspect, but if other lone developers are reading this:
Git's features shine just as brightly, IMO, if you work for yourself.
Granted a good number of them are often not very relevant to a lone developer, but if you work for or by yourself on any projects over the long term, you should build git (or some other distributed source control, but probably git) into the way you work.
Not to excess, by any means. I use a very small subset of git's features and in practice many of my simpler projects don't even use branches, because it's not in the nature of the changes I am making to those projects or the time management I do.
But for example you should consider git an essential step between dev and live -- using it to deploy -- and you should look at how you could use it to facilitate staging and testing.
Combined with a changelog and relentless use of comments and notes, git helps "structured forgetting", which as a freelancer is pretty crucial; sometimes you work frantically on a thing for a month, get paid and then it comes back to you years later.
> And git != code formatter.
No, obviously, but the needs of the former are supported by the benefits of the latter.
That said, I use one for golang but not, in general, for PHP. I should find a code-formatter I can bend to my will for PHP, but after 17 years of increasingly complex lone PHP development, I know what I need from my own formatting requirements in order to manage projects.
In a team is also where code formatters shine, IMO.
The biggest advantages (to me at least) are that they almost entirely eliminate formatting from code review, and the consistent style makes it easy to read and edit code written by different people.
Git is insanely useful regardless of whether you're in a team or not. Having a history of your changes, being able to define an atomic change, branches, etc are all very useful even when working solo.
But I never worked in a big professional team before, where git's features shine.
And git != code formatter.