It's definitely not a super intuitive model, but it is a powerful one.

As I see it, git is a distributed database of snapshots of a directory of files. Every commit is a new snapshot. It's designed the way it is to achieve that goal while minimizing the space used, yet keeping an entire history of the project. It also has tools like git-diff to better compare those snapshots.

But distributed matters most because it was literally designed for managing the Linux kernel development- a large open source project with thousands of contributors working concurrently.

Merge conflicts are hard in this model because you're trying to put two snapshots together, not just two diffs.