This is the fundamental idea behind git - to fully compute/derive diffs from snapshots (commits) and to only store snapshots. While brilliant in some ways - particularly the simplifications it allows in terms of implementation, I’ve always felt that dropping all information about how a new commit was derived from its parent(s) was wasteful. There have been a number of occasions where I wished that git recorded a rename/mv somehow - it’s particularly annoying when you squash some commits and suddenly it no longer recognizes that a file was renamed where previously it was able to determine this. Now your history is broken - “git blame” fails to provide useful information, etc. There are other ways of storing history and revisions which don’t have this issue - git isn’t the end of the line in terms of version control evolution.

CRDT's trick is metadata. Good old diff guesses the changes by solving the longest-common-subsequence problem. There is always some degree of confusion as changes accumulate. CRDTs can know the exact changes, or at least guess less.