[peeters]

I think your understanding is that the Act must be the content. But the Act isn't the content, the Criminal Code, Civil Code etc are the content. The Act itself is more like a patch file, with some surrounding metadata (and its own meta version history as proposed legislation gets marked up throughout the process). It could add a new file, but it could also be an edit. But in neither case is it the effective content, it's a description of changes to said content. (The line does get blurred on the initial commit though, because typically the name of the resulting law is the name of the Act that established it).

So you've called out precisely why version control systems present such a useful analog.