Clearly the poster has never encountered cvs or cvs-next.

And clear OP hasn't heard of vss..

Continuing the theme, a new starter at my place (with about a decade of various experience, including an international financial services information player whose name is well known) had never used git or indeed any distributed, modern source control system.

HN is a tiny bubble. The majority of the world's software engineers are barely using source control, don't do code reviews, don't have continuous build systems, don't have configuration controlled release versions, don't do almost anything that most of HN's visitors think are the basic table stakes just to conduct software engineering.