[steventhedev]

Git doesn't operate on diffs. It stores full content using delta compression. Subtle difference, but it can create ours reverse merges that don't have a diff, but radically change the content of the repo.

What you're talking about is patch theory, which is used by darcs and pujil. Pujil does a better job of explaining the theory.

At the end of the day, the point of version control is to keep a universally consistent snapshot of a sequence of bytes. Patch theory only tells you how to resolve conflicts. TreeDoc, etc simply resolve the conflicts differently based on consistency of ordering, as patches may be applied out of order for it to be a CRDT.