I think it's a bit strange to call the basic idea behind a Merkle tree a "blockchain" -- we already had a word for Merkle trees before Bitcoin came about.
Not your op but I personally do not. The way the word has evolved blockchain includes the distributed consensus. I understand there is a concept of linked blocks, into a chain, and technically Bitcoin and folk are those. If someone said blockchain (datastructure) I would understand it as being only the data structure.
git is a chain of blocks, kinda. it's distributed. there is no consensus. It's not a blockchain by how most people would define it.
Aren't there some altcoins that have attempted to do a blocktree? I haven't paid much attention to them, other than reading about one a while back, but it seems like that wouldn't really go anywhere because once you do away with a single, unified, public view of truth you might as well be using a lightning network?
But if I were describing Git to others, I wouldn't say "Git is a distributed, blockchain-based VCS" because that would give the wrong idea.