You can have that Golden Version and everyone can suggest changes and edits, then the document owner can accept or decline the edits.
[1]: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on-Word...
I wish there was a “pull request” for office with a permission that allowed suggestions but not edits.
Intuitively, this doesn't really seem possible to me for a sophisticated document format. E.g., how would you represent a change to an embedded graph in a pull request? (And would that same approach scale to any form of embedded media?)
A procedure is made up of many flows that are linked together. Everyone that uses the procedure views the "live" flows (like a master branch). Each user gets their own branch which we call a "draft". In a draft, a user is free to make any changes they want (add/delete/modify flows) and then submit all the changes for approval. Approving the change request then merges the changes into the "live" for everyone else to see/use. I even went so far as to build side-by-side diff of the flowcharts, rebasing/merging with live, and conflict resolution.
It's simplified in the UI so the terminology isn't 100% like git. But, one of our biggest hurdles though is actually teaching users how this works why it's better than the current mode of document locks/real time editing. And when our customers "get it", they really fall in love with the concepts and why it's better!
My current understanding is that live collaborative editing is the solution for the same problem version control solves for non-plain text file formats (and therefore, also the solution for non-programmers). Think of how much programmers complain about the complexity of git, and that's using it with plain text, a format that facilitates version control like no other.
For collaborating in every document format that isn't plain text, my solution has been to use live collaborative editing.
>if the same slide is present in 15 Powerpoint decks any edit will require tons of mindless and error-prone copypasting
This is exactly what you want SharePoint for. Have 15 people open the same PowerPoint deck, in desktop PowerPoint, editing the file simultaneously. It's fully versioned and you have no merging of files back together.