alt Hacker NewsThe biggest benefits of Git over predecessors were branching, 3-way merge, and history rewrites (in particular, rebase and squash). As much as Git fans wanted decentralization to be a major selling point, decentralization has never been a major selling point.
Not exactly decentralization but distribution was the main selling point.
In comparison to SVN and other non-DVCs git did not need to continuously talk to the central server for history, "branch" creations, unlocking/locking files before changes, etc.
Linus wanted a DVCS, but they wanted centralization and licenses were expensive, so he decided to launch the git initiative where he provided scaffolding and the rest came from contributions.