> especially for dealing with rebase/merge conflicts where I would say Git is mediocre.
It seems like everyone that hold this opinion want Git to be some magical tool that will guess their intent and automatically resolve the conflict. The only solutions other than surfacing the conflict are locking (transactions) or using some consensus algorithm (maybe powered by logical clocks). The first sucks and no one has been able to design the second (code is an end result, not the process of solving a problem).
> It seems like everyone that hold this opinion want Git to be some magical tool that will guess their intent and automatically resolve the conflict.
Absolutely not. There are plenty of fairly trivial solutions where Git's default merge algorithm gives you horrible diffs. Even for cases as simple as adding a function to a file it will get confused and put closing brackets in different parts of the diff. Nobody is asking for perfection but if you think it can't be improved you lack imagination.
There are a number of projects to improve this like Mergiraf. Someone looked at fixing the "sliders" problem 10 years ago but sadly it didn't seem to go anywhere, probably because there are too many core Git developers who have the same attitude as you.
https://github.com/mhagger/diff-slider-tools
> where Git's *default* merge algorithm gives you horrible diffs
You are saying it yourself.
Saying what? Defaults matter. The fact that other people are doing their best to improve Git's mediocre defaults doesn't excuse it.
I doubt you would defend any of Windows' poor defaults because there are tools to fix them.