> In practice… last write wins (LWW) is a CFDT operator, so replace every mention of CRDT with LWW and issues will more obvious.

Yeah. A lot of people are also confused by the twin meanings of the word "conflict". The "C" in CRDT stands for "Conflict (free)", but that really means "failure free". Ie, given any two concurrent operations, there is a well defined "merge" of the two operations. The merge operation can't fail.

The second meaning is "conflict" as in "git commit conflict", where a merge gets marked as requiring human intervention.

Once you define the terms correctly, its possible to write a CRDT-with-commit-conflicts. Just define a "conflict marker" which are sometimes emitted when merging. Then merging can be defined to always succeed, sometimes emitting conflict markers along the way.

> Really though, the problem with merges is not conflicts, it’s when the merged code is wrong but was correct on both sides before the merge.

CRDTs have strictly more information about whats going on than Git does. At worst, we should be able to remake git on top of CRDTs. At best, we can improve the conflict semantics.

being able to customize the chunking/diffing process with something analogous to an lsp would greatly improve this. In my experience a particularly horribly handled case is when eg two branches add two distinct methods/functions in the same file location (especially if there is some boilerplate so that the two blocks share more than a few lines).

a language aware merge could instead produce

>>>> function foo(){ ... } ===== function bar(){ ... } <<<<<<