Which he lost... i.e. Linus paid no attention to what Bram said ;)

For some context, Git follows the same architecture as Codeville, so Linus didn't invent the idea (although he ripped it off from Monotone, not Codeville) and the argument was essentially about whether a simple three-way merge can be used in all cases, and the answer is no, because of criss-cross cases, and solutions for that have since been put into Git. It is the case that semantics which more closely resemble three way merge are preferred though, as explained in my post which this thread is about, but for reasons which nobody in the flame war you link to appreciated at the time.