I used mercurial at one job and my experience was that the day-to-day differences were largely philosophical, especially if you primarily interact with VCS through your IDE, like me. Mercurial’s CLI API is supposedly cleaner, but I hardly interacted with it.

Mercurial has immutable history, so no squashing commits, no deleting branches, at the time I was using it there was no amending commits, in fact reverting a commit doesn’t even come enabled out of the box! Some folks loved it; no changing history, everything documented as it happened. We practiced trunk based development, so no branches except for hotfixes, so there wasn’t a lot of sprawl.

Ecosystems largely don’t support mercurial, so that’s definitely a consideration. Since Merge Requests and feature branches are largely practiced now, I feel like there’d be a lot of noise in a repo if folks used mercurial.

I don’t particularly miss mercurial, personally. I’m less into “pure” workflows and forcing behaviors. I think git is super flexible and generally practical and I’m overall pretty happy with it.