Saying “it’s a graph of commits” makes no sense to a layperson.
Sure, but git is aimed at programmers. Who should have learned graph theory in university. It was past of the very first course I had as an undergraduate many years ago.
Git is definitely hard though for almost all the reasons in the article, perhaps other reasons too. But not understanding what a DAG is shouldn’t be one of them, for the intended target audience.
I really don’t see what niche it is trying to fill that isn’t already occupied.
Rust is as successful as it is because it found a previously unoccupied niche: safe systems programming without garbage collector and with high level abstractions that (mostly) optimise away.
I don’t think “better C” is a big enough niche to be of interest to enough people for it to gain a critical mass. I certainly have very little interest in it myself.
There are existing approaches: GNU gettext and Mozilla fluent comes to mind. I would try to use one of those. I understand that Mozilla Fluent has good support for the Web (unsurprisingly).
Your idea will work with minor changes (if comments are supported in your file format). At work our tooling create entries like 123="English text" // UNTRANSLATED. Obviously not quite the same format, but it should be adaptable to any format that supports comments.
Swedish layout. Not ideal for coding (too many things like curly and square brackets etc are under altgr. And tilde and backtick are on dead keys.
But switching back and forth as soon as you need to write Swedish (for the letters åäö) is just too much work. And yes, in the Swedish alphabet they are separate letters, not aao with diacretics.