This is cool! I've been thinking about this a lot in a similar domain (JSON / YAML for configuration), and I've come to the conclusion that anything approaching manual merge is pretty much the worst thing ever.

The domain I'm specifically thinking of is managing routing rules, like nginx configs or control-plane configs for Envoy. It's really tempting to simplify it down to a config file, then you version-control it, then you get merge conflicts, and all of a sudden a bad merge makes 10% of your services unroutable. Which is hilariously bad.

Having an auto-merge for those sort of configs seems like the only reasonable way to do it. Escalating conflicts up, from easy merge, to trying an automatic strategy, to surfacing conflicts to the user in a domain-specific way, seems like the only way to do it!