Blame the Linus Torvalds personality cult. Only way that terrible UX got traction in the first place. If anyone OTHER than Linus had written it, it would have been mocked, and deservedly so.
Why it "won" over alternatives with cleaner UX (eg Hg) is a different question, and I think has a lot to do with github.
It gets in the way of the workflow IMO.
Named branches being baked in turned out to actually be a real pain in mercurial. Sure, you can use bookmarks (and we did) but starts to quickly feel like you're swimming against the current.
People use git because everybody else uses git and it started because GitHub provides easy code sharing and a better UI than the alternative — SourceForge and mailing lists.
At the time it was the only distributed and open source VCS. Fossil may have come quickly on its heels, but it was already too late.
> The first open-source DVCS systems included Arch, Monotone, and Darcs. However, open source DVCSs were never very popular until the release of Git and Mercurial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control#Hi...