CRDTs store a superset of the information git stores - so we should be able to use that information to emit git style conflicts when we want. But I think nobody has implemented that yet. (Pijul probably comes closest.)
When editing is relatively "live", those are small enough that they're probably also correct. But adding your month of changes to a dozen other people's month of changes doesn't mean it's going to build correctly (or even look sane) when you change the same file. Manually seeing the issue and fixing it gives you a chance to correct that, at the time it's relevant, rather than "it all changed, good luck".
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If you're interested in distributed-VCS systems that have some different semantics than git, https://pijul.org/ might be interesting. And Jujutsu is... complicated, as it abstracts across a few and brings in a few things from multiple VCSes, but it's mostly git-like afaict: https://github.com/martinvonz/jj
No doubt there are others too (if anyone has favorites, please post! I'm curious too)
The tooling will normally bail with a "would fork" message if a `fossil update` (and, hence, local resolution of those conflicts) wasn't undertaken before pushing, but this is not at all necessary to preserve useful operation.
Yep. But there's no reason you couldn't build a system that supports both approaches - conflict-free when live pair programming, but conflicts are still generated when merging long lived branches. As I say, text CRDTs store all the data needed to do this. Just, nobody (as far as I know) has built that.
But a diff between two different states of raw text can't convey the intent of a code change (beyond very simple changes).
This is why I think CRDTs haven't caught on for VCSes and I'm not sure they _could_ without some kind of structured editing.
That said, a clearer model for why it conflicts, and how things got there, can definitely help understand what happened and therefore what to do next. Git isn't great there, you're just given the final conflict pair.