Not sure what's cool about that. A fork is a patch set, with a ton more ergonomics on top. Passing around sets of patches was what we did before VCSs were common/easy-to-set-up, and it was always brittle and annoying.

Here is a homework for you to see why they do it:

  1. Checkout Chromium's codebase.  
  2. Make a commit and see how long it takes.  
  3. Try to push it to any git hosting service.  

And yes, being 10s vs 10000s devs in the same repo isn't fun.