Much more principled (and hence less of a foot-gun) way of handling conflicts is making them first class objects in the repository, like https://pijul.org does.

Jujutsu too[0]:

> Jujutsu keeps track of conflicts as first-class objects in its model; they are first-class in the same way commits are, while alternatives like Git simply think of conflicts as textual diffs. While not as rigorous as systems like Darcs (which is based on a formalized theory of patches, as opposed to snapshots), the effect is that many forms of conflict resolution can be performed and propagated automatically.

[0] https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj