Commits are also used as diffs by several git commands - rebase, cherry-pick, patch, probably others. These commands take a commit and a target branch, but they

Commits are also used as diffs by several git commands - rebase, cherry-pick, patch, probably others. These commands take a commit and a target branch, but they use the commit as a diff from its parent, not as a snapshot. So it's fair to say that git's own API treats commits as diffs in some situations.