This seems like a clear case of unequal tradeoffs. There are a couple of conflict patterns that are particularly easy to identify, which git could merge smooth

This seems like a clear case of unequal tradeoffs. There are a couple of conflict patterns that are particularly easy to identify, which git could merge smoothly. For instance, two unrelated code blocks are appended to the bottom of the same file - whoever merged those two probably wants to keep both in any order. But if you don't want that behavior, git is going to quietly auto-merge a bad change. That's easily 10x as bad as the time savings is good, maybe 100x. So I agree - this should not be magic, and I'm pretty sure the design for auto-merge hits practical limits long before technical ones.