[chclt]

I think this highlights a deeper issue with how we as programmers tend to think about abstractions. It is easy to pretend, that you can conjure any interface/any abstraction from thin air as long as you define what you want well enough. But the reality is, that a good abstraction needs to be build using elegant constituent parts. It needs to be built in a way, which looks at the problem in an angle which simplifies it.

Building named sequences of source changes via commits which chain together, with the only thing that defines the identity of the chain being a ref to the end is such an elegant abstraction, which is not bad to expose; It allows for easy reasoning about source changes. Saying git branches are a seperate sequence of commits and keeping it at that would be not a good abstraction, even if you hid the implementation really well.