You've never maintained a long-lived git feature branch, it seems :)

I maintain a project that is a slight modification of a very active upstream repo. The changes I maintain are rather invasive. Almost every upstream commit introduces a merge conflict with my changes.

To keep myself sane I only merge/rebase when upstream releases a new version, but it still ends up sucking up a few weeks of my time every year. During those weeks, I look enviously at pijul where the conflicts would resolve down to a handful of corrections in context at the point of divergence, instead of gigantic merge conflicts obscured by thousands of piled on patches.