That said it can be useful sometimes to push changes out of band straight to a colleague. I have used this a few times to great effect but don't often come across the need
> git was invented before continuous delivery
git was invented 2005. So you mean when people used the term Continuous Delivery more frequently? Because using CI and automatically deploy is not "new" and was surely done before git - I remember doing that even with CVS and SVN.
It's goes hand in hand with BDD and automated testing. I reckon there's a lot less people doing this stuff today in the wild than you'd think.
Sure there's the Netflix's n googles of the world. It was only a few years ago I would consult on projects that would have no CI. It happens.
The same thing is happening today, just because you read about kubernetes or swarm simply does not mean anything like the majority of the people out there are using it in production. Just go to a conference and and watch people stick their hands in the air.
Sure SOMEONE might have been doing continuous delivery back in 2005, it certainly wasn't me. I was too busy learning about data access objects vs ORMs and releases were 3 months away if you were lucky.
Maybe before the word was invented, we just called it "developing in the production environment" before "continous delivery" was trendy. (And yes, we used the derisive name even if it took a couple spins on a developer workstation before getting rushed to prod.)
releasing often from one stable master branch
Subversion has serverside hooks. It was common to use them to push trunk to production after checkins. I know this because I was there writing some of those scripts.