You can see „git reflog“ as a sort of automatic tmp-branch creation at every step. Of course your way works as well, and I tend to do the same when I know it‘s getting hairy, but it‘s nice to just be able to do git stuff knowing you can always go back without much precaution.
The only thing I need to remind me to be careful about is, as said, uncommitted changes. With some luck, Time Machine can help for that, but to be safe I practically always stash away changes instead of somehow undoing them.
I prefer to use git from GUI and those usually do not support reflog. I'm aware of it, but that's my tool of the last resort, if I did something very wrong.
The only thing I need to remind me to be careful about is, as said, uncommitted changes. With some luck, Time Machine can help for that, but to be safe I practically always stash away changes instead of somehow undoing them.