Maybe it is time to reintroduce agents to Extreme Programming. Mainly leaning into frequent integration (putting the continuous back in CI)

Imo merge conflicts are usually a symptom of another problem like poor coordination, poor architecture, too big of change sets, branches that are too long lived. I think the most common case I hit them is conflicting package lock file updates but merging is usually useless there. For lock files you usually just pick one version then have the package manager update it.