[pmeunier]

The key insight of Pijul is to be the smallest generalisation of a file that is a CRDT with insertions and deletions of bytes as its two operations, where "smallest" and "file" are meant in a specific sense.

The main thing that makes it all work is the extreme performance of its storage backend, which allows to manipulate a graph datastructure directly on disk, and avoid as many IO operations as possible while doing that. This works well, as all operations in Pijul (with some caveats) work in a time logarithmic in the size of history. And yet, it is slower than Git for some operations.

Therefore, what you're suggesting is linear in the size of history (importing), i.e. exponentially slower than Pijul, for every single merge!