I don’t agree at all. Merging conflicts correctly is often incredibly hard and requires judgement and understanding of semantics and ramifications that are difficult for even skilled developers.

Who did what when why? Everyone has understanding of those semantics.

It's literally entirely on a computer. If that somehow makes it harder to answer basic human questions about the complex things we're using it for, well that means we've got a problem folks.

The problem is with comprehensibility, and it's entrenched (because the only way for a piece of software to outlive its 50 incompatible analogs and reach mass recognition is to become entrenched; not to represent its domain perfectly)

The issue lies in how the tools that we've currently converged on (e.g. Git) represent the semantics of our activity: what information is retained at what granularity determines what workflows are required of the user; and thence what operations the user comes to expect to be "easy" or "hard", "complex" or "simple". (Every interactive program is a teaching aid of itself, like how when you grok a system you can whip together a poor copy of it in a couple hours out of shit and sticks)

Consider Git's second cousin the CRDT, where "merges" are just a few tokens long, so they happen automatically all the time with good results. Helped in application context by how a "shared editor" interface is considerably more interactive than the "manually versioned folder" approach of Git. There's shared backspace.

Git was designed for emailing patches over dialup, there it obviously pays to be precise; and it's also awesome at enabling endless bikeshedding on projects far less essential than the kernel, thanks to the proprietary extension that are Pull Requests.

Probably nobody has any real incentive to pull off anything better, if the value proposition of the existing solution starts with "it has come to be expected". But it's not right to say it's inherently hard, some of us have just become used to making it needlessly hard on ourselves, and that's whose breakfast the bots are now eating (shoo, bots! scram)

So in other words it requires the skills you need to make an edit in the first place.