My interpretation within that company: You know this new idea of "If it's painful, do it more"? People in that company didn't do that in the SVN days or earlier, because merges were painful. Thus, merges filled a sprint if they had to be done. This made sense if you came from CSV or nothing, tbh.

Git in turn made branches easier, causing merges to be more prevalent and developers overall learned to merge more, merge more often.