> E.g. if you merge two branches with the same patches but in different order, but the file contents are the same at the end, git will need to you to manually address the merges for each patch.
That's not really true - only in the case where the changes are ambiguous.
I've worked on very hairy Git repos and haven't really felt blocked, even when some crazy merge conflicts happened.
I was surprised that the post numbers appear to be sequential, and that there would be ~30M. Over 15 years of HN, that's ~5K posts/day, and about 200 new posts/hour. Things accrue. I'd estimate that HN is well north of 300K readers/day ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581
edit - it looks like each comment has its own item id. So posts are both new items and comments. That makes more sense to me in terms of scale.
In any case, the answer to your question is that Pijul can solve certain kinds of merges automatically when Git gives you a conflict that needs manual intervention.
That's not really true - only in the case where the changes are ambiguous.
I've worked on very hairy Git repos and haven't really felt blocked, even when some crazy merge conflicts happened.