git is overkill for facilities with small groups working in a common area (not hard to imagine if you're in the hardware biz) and all the engineers are used to cvs command syntax..
I'm struggling to think of a situation where Git could be overkill for anything... I've personally used it for hardware and software projects where it was just me, where it was used for small teams (3-5 people), and with hundreds of developers doing on a large code base. It worked well on al of them.
The only thing I would not use version control is if you have files that don't change. Everything else should be in some form of VC (sometimes Git is not the best choice, but it's good for lots of things)
Semiconductors, especially VLSI, have a different workflow from most software projects. There are supposed to be as few releases as humanly possibly due to the enormous cost of each release. There are not expected to be a community of developer/designers, each with their own vector of revisions available for development and testing. It is prized to arrive at a single image which is reproduced as many times as possible in practice, rather than in variation, as the lithographic process favors identical reproductions.
In my estimate, Broadcom is on the cusp of reaching a sublime point I've seen in other, unnamed semiconductor companies, at which the number of combinations and revisions of IP within a family of chips becomes difficult to account for.
So, it's really not even a question of git being overkill - it's a question of whether its source code will persist over many times the length of the proejct. Git will be considered for substitution by those deeply committed to CVS simply after a matter of time, once its institutional bugs have been discovered and patched.
Overkill until the network goes down or the server dies or somebody needs to work remotely and the VPN isn't working. I don't know how fast git is wrt cvs, but I remember being pleasantly surprised coming from svn.
You don't have to have a distributed workflow to occasionally reap the benefits of working with git.
There _are_ differences, but yeah - you're arguing about the ranking of the 99.91% - 99.95% better solutions compared to no version control. (Seriously - even CVS and SourceSafe are 99.9% closer to "perfect" than doing nothing)
On my one man team, the very first command I type on a project after mkdir is git init. Everything is logged and timestamped, and it is far from overkill. Git is easy to learn after working with CVS