Right.

How we got git was cvs was totally terrible[1], so Linus refused to use it. Larry McEvoy persuaded Linus to use Bitkeeper for the Linux kernel development effort. After trying Bitkeeper for a while, Linus did the thing of writing v0 of git in a weekend in a response to what he saw as the shortcomings of Bitkeeper for his workflow.[2]

But the point is there had already been vcs that saw wide adoption, serious attempts to address shortcomings in those (perforce and bitkeeper in particular) and then git was created to address specific shortcomings in those systems.

It wasn't born out of just a general "I wish there was something easier than rebase" whine or a desire to create the next thing. I haven't seen anything that comes close to being compelling in that respect. jj comes into that bucket for me. It looks "fine". Like if I was forced to use it I wouldn't complain. It doesn't look materially better than git in any way whatsoever though, and articles like this which say "it has no index" make me respond with "Like ok whatever bro". It really makes no practical difference to me whether the VCS has an index.

[1] I speak as someone who maintained a CVS repo with nearly 700 active developers and >20mm lines of code. When someone made a mistake and you had to go in and edit the repo files in binary format it was genuinely terrifying.

[2] In a cave. From a box of scraps. You get the idea.

To be fair the "shortcomings" that spurred it on mainly were the Samba guys (or just one) reverse-engineering Bitkeeper causing the kernel free license getting pulled, which caused Linus to say "I can build my own with blackjack and pre-commit hooks" and then he did, addressing it toward his exact use case.

It gained tons of popularity mainly because of Linus being behind it; similar projects already existed when it was released.