I professionally used RCS, CVS, Subversion and Perforce before Git came along. Hell, I was actually in a company that FTP'd it's PHP files directly to the production server.
People in the field less than 20 years might not appreciate the magnitude of this change (though, adding my two cents to the author's article, branching in p4 was fine). People may have also dealt with ClearCase (vobs!) or Microsoft Visual SourceSafe.
Git did as much for software development velocity as any other development in recent history.
That's all true for me, too, although I hadn't used p4. I resisted Git for a little while because I didn't see the massive appeal of a distributed system in an office with a central server. CVS... worked. SVN was a much more pleasant "faster horse". And then I made myself try Git for a week to see the fuss was all about and my eyes were opened.
Git is not perfect. There are other products that did/do some things better, or at least more conveniently. But Git was miles ahead of anything else at the time that I could use for free, and after I tasted it, I never wanted to go back to anything else.
I was a late adopter, also, and git is definitely not perfect. Mercurial did some things better, and at the time, notably, the forest extension. Git's flexibility is a two edged sword and the history rewrite footguns should be harder to use. Git does comes close enough to solving a fundamental problem it will be very, very durable, though. As long as it is used for linux kernel development I expect it continue to be the dominant dvcs.
God I hated ClearCase, did a migration from it in 2016(!) for a project that had been around since the late 80s. People were really resistant to moving but once it was done were like "Oh wow, it's really fast to create a branch, this means we don't have to have one branch for three months!"
People in the field less than 20 years might not appreciate the magnitude of this change (though, adding my two cents to the author's article, branching in p4 was fine). People may have also dealt with ClearCase (vobs!) or Microsoft Visual SourceSafe.
Git did as much for software development velocity as any other development in recent history.