[foresto]

That's a fair criticism for some workflows, and I like the lightweight model, but we should keep in mind the context of the time:

When these DVCS appeared, Git's branch design departed from what "branch" meant practically everywhere else. That added to its already significant learning curve, creating more friction for people trying (or being asked) to adopt it.

Meanwhile, Mercurial's "branch" was closer to well-established norms. This was one of several factors that made it the easier of the two to learn, which was was important when already asking people to uproot from their familiar centralized systems and learn the ins and outs of distributed version control. I suspect it also made repository migrations more straightforward, avoiding the impedance mismatch presented by Git's branches.