[hyperhopper]

> Obviously the rise of git played a big role in this.

I would argue it's the other way around. Mercurial is a better source control system, and was a close contender with git back then. However, GitHub winning the hosting war and also being all in on git is what cemented git as the leader. Bitbucket was hosting both and with a more generous free plan, but they didn't win the social and UX fight so git became the de facto standard since that's what you used on the cool good new platform.

[globular-toast]

I felt like the kernel using git gave it a lot of credibility. I can't recall any big projects using Mercurial. Trust is especially important for a version control system.