Have you read the paper, especially their study design?(p11/302 is a good summary, also last 5 pages for actual instructions). They have sample size of 10 people, and they specifically choose a very basic workflow.

This study design is a real problem -- even after I have read the paper, I am not convinced that I should be using gitless. Their graph looks science-y, but the small sample size and non-representative experiment design means the conclusion do not apply to my work.

Reading this paper is reading a DB benchmark which only used rows with two integer fields in all their tests. Sure, it is interesting reading, but unless your workflow is exactly that, it is useless in real life.

(Disclaimer: it is entirely possible that gitless is better than git in all workflows, not just the one described in the paper. But even if it is the case, I would not know about it, at least not from the gitless site.)

I'm not sure I put a lot of faith in that study to measure anything other than that new users of a VCS are confused by the existence of a staging area.