For one thing, Git is abysmal at merging rich text formats that need balancing open/close annotation markers, like HTML <strong> and similar. With line/character oriented merge algorithms syntax errors from merge are inevitable. Once you start pulling that thread, like “ok can we clean up such mistakes automatically with a better merge algorithm that understands the content a bit more?” you’ll end up back here at CRDTs.

I’ve tried managing markdown docs in git a few times. Even with a team of senior+ engineer git experts it became a pain on frequently changing documents because conflicts were so common — if you wrap markdown at 80 characters, rewording a sentence is more likely to merge conflict than changing a variable in code since it may re-wrap several lines; and if you don’t wrap at all, any change in the paragraph will conflict on the entire paragraph.

Yep. And git can't at all handle realtime editing (since you'd need to commit & push after every keystroke). Or handle any non-text data. Even markdown, as you mentioned, can be a pain.

CRDTs should be able to solve all of these problems. One thing we're still missing in CRDTs is git style conflicts when merging long running branches. Should be possible - but still nobody has solved that as far as I know.

Re: markdown in vcs

Put each sentence and/or clause on its own line and it will avoid a large fraction of issues. Not all though.