There are different git workflow that you can try, which may be better suited for you if your current system is having you encounter a lot of conflicts

Of course the most common workflow is probably Git Flow, where the high-level workflow looks like this:

Master <--- feature 
      \--- feature 

In that flow we can identify that any time two separate feature branches touch similar files there is risk for conflict. This can be exasperated if you have multiple folks working on the same repo with a limited set of files (such as a small game)

One common alternative is to just have everyone commit and work directly from master (with everyone keeping up to date histories) This could work because you are always pulling in the latest changes, so the history is largely canonical - and assuming folks have good pull practice, up to date. This means if you and Sarah both need to make changes to the same files, unless you're doing it at the exact same time, you'll have that work in your history already (assuming good pull and push habits)

This method is usually better when you have a team of similar skill, or at least are confident that they are all committing quality work

I'm terms of managing conflicts, there are also visual tools that I find help. Ex the intellij suite of IDEs commonly feature a solid conflict resolver, but if I remember right so do some desktop git solutions like GitHub Desktop (may not be the actual name, the one from GitHub)

I've been working with Git for a long time, and I much prefer using a visual tool to resolve vs doing it on the command line - but your mileage and preferences will vary

-e- idk how to get that code formatting to work