Spaced repetition is more for remembering things. I've had good experience with it.
However, I don't think the methods used in this article are valid to test spaced repetition.
The test the author used are solving problems. Solving a problem require much more than recalling facts. Just because you remember something doesn't mean you understand it. In my opinion this is a very flawed experiment.
I think my skills as an experienced developer come from having solved many problems (as well as having made plenty of mistakes) in the past. When I look at a problem these days I try to think back to similar problems in the past, what worked and what didn't. Its not so often that actually need to sit down and think through a new algorithm. So it comes down to "remembering things" as much as it does to "working things out".
There must be an in-between case where a small problem is solved by remembering the method. The kind of thing where you end up looking up the double-angle formulae or checking the definition for integration by parts. I guess the programming equivalent is remembering how to insert into a tree or do a bubble sort.
Problem-solving in the general case encompasses all of human creativity: I wouldn't claim that one becomes capable of tackling difficult problems through memorising techniques. But once you're part-way to solving a problem there is often a sequence of simpler steps (analysis, not synthesis) - surely most of us would like to be faster/more efficient/make fewer errors in these steps.
If I feel like the history of a branch is important, I add a git tag to the branch head before rebasing. I have a naming convention for these tags.
Then I usually do a rebase -i on to the main branch.
