I think you understate what a big deal branching was when Git came out. Back in the early 2000s, branching was hard. Git's predecessors, such as SVN, didn't hav

I think you understate what a big deal branching was when Git came out. Back in the early 2000s, branching was hard. Git's predecessors, such as SVN, didn't have branching at all until much later, and even then the implementation was riddled with problems and quite often the repo entered state where branches cannot merge back to main (which was called trunk back then). No matter how beneficial the ability to work offline was, branching was still far more important. It's a completely different order of magnitude. Git without offline capabilities would still be a massive success. Git without branching would not.