I am also hopeful for Pijul. But yes, the "if you work alone" backfires for it too. If I work alone, I can adopt Pijul in my work easily, but I don't really want it. If I work within a group then I do want a better VCS, but I should convince the majority of people I work with to switch to the new thing, so essentially I can't switch to Pijul unless there is an undoubtfully good reason to do so. And incremental gains are not a good reason. A "saner" and "better" isn't enough.

On the other hand, we all work alone in between commits (in a broad sense of the term), so having a second tier of a version control, a personal tier, may be a gamechanger.