> Back in a day we had Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar, some others.

I don’t agree bazaar was a UX panacea over git, and it was not just “not by much” slower. Subversion was a piece of shit full stop (especially if you had the misfortune of using the original bdb impl), bested in this regard only by VSS. I think slower “not by much” is the understatement of the century for a repo of any substantial size for all but mercurial on your list.

You don’t even mention perforce, leading me to think most of your experience is skewed by the niche of small open source projects.

Mercurial was a contender... great windows support too. I think it was less kernel that killed it and more github.