Most developers today know Git. But before Git became the industry standard, another Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) was competing closely with it: Mercurial (Hg) Interestingly, companies like Meta and Mozilla trusted Mercurial for large-scale engineering workflows involving massive repositories and thousands of developers. That raises an interesting question: If Git became the default standard, why did some elite engineering teams still choose Mercurial? The answer reveals important lessons about: developer experience scalability engineering workflows ecosystem adoption distributed systems thinking What is Mercurial? Mercurial is a Distributed Version Control System created in 2005. Like Git, it allows developers to: track code changes collaborate across teams create branches merge changes maintain project history But Mercurial had a different philosophy: prioritize simplicity and usability.…