For patch sets/commutation, I find their system appealing. I think it’s tempting to yearn for something better still (eg darcs had a kind of sed-like patch that could apply its search to patches that are merged with it). If you look at how big companies do development, code review, CI, etc into monorepos, this is typically done with diff-focused thinking. Having the VC system and associated metadata attached to the individual patches (or sets thereof) feels like it could be an improvement over rebases or complex merge structures.