git didn't succeed based on the mental model. It got a foot in the door with better tooling and developer experience then blew the door open when GitHub found a way to productize it.

Git doesn't have a moat. Git isn't commercial software, and doesn't need to strong arm you into accepting bad license terms.

I wouldn’t characterize it as a moat exactly. svn/cvs just had a braindead data model. Linus started git with a fundamentally better one.

I definitely see the potential of AI-native version control, it will take a bit more to convince me this is a similar step-level improvement though.