[JeremyBanks]

While Piper does technically have SVN-like branches, they're so unwieldy and poorly supported by lots of tooling (our team could never get TAP and our slightly-unusual testing to work on branches) that they're a much more niche tool than something like Git branches.

I agree with you with respect to CLs/snapshots. I would sometimes try chains of DIFFBASE-linked CLs in a crude emulation of linear Git branches (I want to experiment with taking things different ways, and I want the version control to store/back up my work), which sort-of worked when you're writing the code, but merging could be nasty. But there was also ad-hoc Git hosting available internally. I started using that for my experimenting, squashing into Piper commits when it was ready to share. It wasn't terrible, though still not optimal for collaboration.