Nonono, that method existed long before Git. Git reinvented the wheel, if they did a better job about it is not for me to judge :-)

That's what I do (for personal projects where I don't care about complex commit-graphs) and I do call it version control.

Justifications like "where I don't care about complex commit-graphs," of which there are a few in this thread, always sound like they're trying to hide confusion about the tool by making it sound overly complex. Nobody cares about complex commit-graphs!

If you're just one person, you can work directly on master and just commit everything every time:

    git commit -am "I did some work"

Don't try to follow gitflow or githubflow or whatever it is that's made you bail on real version control. But why play the copying folders monty game in 2019?

You don't seem to understand my previous comment. Tarballs are better. Complex commit-graphs are not a reason to avoid git for small projects, they are a reason why I can't avoid git for large projects. The revision history is complex or not regardless of what software I'm using to slog through it.

diff, branch, merge, blame, stash