> the result is always the same no matter what order branches are merged in — including many branches mashed together by multiple people working independently.

Why is that valuable?

Yeah, symmetry is overrated.

Git's merge is already symmetrical for two branches being merged, and that, in and of itself, often leads to problems.

It's completely unclear that extending this to multiple branches would provide any goodness.

non sequitur

I was wondering when someone would try to cram The Slop Machine into this.

This was my immediate thought when seeing this post too lol.

Syntax-only manual merges are just time consuming waste of human time.

I'm a small PR-er so 99% of the time it is Syntax. If if it is semnatic at all often then try trunk based development.

The CRDT isn't syntax-aware either

If it is doing what I think CRDT does, and tracking where the user clicked and what they typed, it sort of carries a bit more syntax info. It has a chance to get it right. And often since it does something it turns a figure this shit out with review this.

Much better is AST merging (which itself is also more amenable to crdts). But doing this at the text level is doing to be a failed experiment - the value isn’t there.