I have the feeling the answer to this question is no but I figured I would ask anyways.
Long story short I accidentally did a git clean -d -f on a branch and lost about 20 files that I needed. These files have not been committed so as far as I know git shouldn’t know about them. Is there any way I can get these files back?
Unfortunately, your only option is a filesystem “undelete” program. For maximum probability of success, don’t do anything on that volume until you obtain and can use an undelete program (ie. don’t even download the undelete program onto that volume).