There's even a suggestion here advocating for changing how one writes prose in order to accommodate version control! But this is a solved problem from at least as early as the 1990s. Track changes! Don't use git to track versions of your novel.

Track changes, and label a specific part of your timeline as draft 1. Google Docs supports this. Scrivener (created specifically for writing novels) does this. Etc.

Why would I use git? It's designed for tracking changes to linted code.