I don't mean to minimize the effort that went into Git. But, have you ever looked at the source code? It's like someone dropped the kitchen sink into the global namespace. The whole code base is full of premature optimizations. And, there's a lot of low-level infrastructure code coupled in with the core logic.

I know abstraction is out of fashion these days, but it may have helped a little in organizing things. Abstraction, when used properly, can almost always make complicated things more simple.

Basically, if a regular person had created Git, and not a demigod, would it even have become what it is?

we would have hg.

as a user, I'll take premature optimizations over slow as balls any day.

The problem with premature optimization is that most of it has little effect on overall performance. Software performance almost always follows a Pareto distribution.

But, wtf do I know, I'm just some regular person.

It's hard to tell - did the premature optimizations allow Git to extend way beyond the initial release with little worries of performance? It's not something that's easily quantifiable.