But, you can choose not to branch then?
I’m really confused about the trade offs of version control. I can understand trade offs of branching strategies, but at its most fundamental (snapshots of your code at arbitrary times), I can’t think of any drawbacks?
Are you familiar with the artistic practice of adding "artificial" constraints in order to promote creativity and productivity? See Gadsby, the novel written without using the letter "e", or anything produced by Oulipo.
The point is that we have a superabundance of choice with software architecture and programming tools. One subset of those tools comprises things provided by version control. Give yourself a version control-less, limited development environment and see how it influences the way you think about and practice coding. There will be sharp edges, but if you give it an honest attempt, you will also very likely discover novel and better ways of doing more with less.
There are many things you can try. Disable syntax highlighting in your editor; try exclusively using a line editor such as ed; flatten your codebase into a single directory; code everything in a single file; organize your data structures to minimize pointer chasing; support extreme cross-platform compatibility (10 OSes?); write platform-independent code using "only assembly" (a la Forth, sectorlisp, or whatever); write a thing and then nuke and rewrite 5 times; etc.
IMHO, value in the above is most easily discovered by retaining a strong introspective eye throughout your personal development process. Where are the pain points? What processes force you to think about non-end goal issues? When does coding feel the most glorious? When did you have the deepest insights? Blah blah blah.
Not OP, but I'd argue you are the one moving the goalpost here.
If someone says they are not using "version control", I'm going to assume that they are not using git (or similar) at all. Any other meaning would be so arbitrary to be almost useless. No one can guess where you draw the line in the sand between "I'm not using any version control tool" to "I'm technically using a version control tool but I'm not doing version control because I don't do X,Y,Z".
I personally can't imagine writing any non trivial piece of code without using git. Even in its more basic form, the advantages are overwhelming. But at no point of my 20+ years of development I've ever applied the same rigorous version control rules of professional environments to my personal projects. At best I've used branches to separate features (rarely, and mostly when I got tired of working on a problem and wanted to work on a different one for some time), and PRs to have an opportunity to review the changes I made to see if I forgot to do something. At "worst" I simply used it as a daily snapshot tool (possibly with some notes about what's left to do) or as a checkpoint after getting something complicated working.
If the author has finally figured out rigorous source control can be unnecessary and counterproductive on small projects - good on them! But if that's the case then say that. Calling the fine tuning of which process you want (or don't want) to use "no version control" is just misleading.
I would be nice to just make my change without having to show it in a series of discrete steps.
I’m not actually opposed to this standard, but trying to show one perceivable downside that op may be alluding to (I’m not actually sure?)
You could just check in your code every night. And, vs not having those commits (even without messages) - what could possibly be the downside?
If the OP is referring to version control because they're needing to handle multiple branch types, switching between versions etc that is much more involved....but also makes it even harder to see how you can manage that by simply dropping version control entirely?
From the article, it does seem like it's not about any sort of specific feature they use, but rather the sheer basic "save versions of code" aspect of VC:
"Version control kept me attached to the past"
To go back to an earlier comment, this honestly sounds like burnout to me if you're having temporal anxiety from saving code.