It definitely can, and it also sometimes happens to us.

But we try to reduce the chance this happens quite a bit, by avoiding letting files grow too big, for example.

Other things we do, is use codeformatting with rules that reduce the chance of merge conflicts. For instance, instead of having imports like:

  import SomePackage.{A, B, C}

we format it to:

  import SomePackage.A
  import SomePackage.B
  import SomePackage.C

That alone helps a lot. Other formatting rules that avoid dense lines, and instead splits over multiple lines also have a huge impact on merge-conflicts.