alt Hacker News> It seems like everyone that hold this opinion want Git to be some magical tool that will guess their intent and automatically resolve the conflict.
Absolutely not. There are plenty of fairly trivial solutions where Git's default merge algorithm gives you horrible diffs. Even for cases as simple as adding a function to a file it will get confused and put closing brackets in different parts of the diff. Nobody is asking for perfection but if you think it can't be improved you lack imagination.
There are a number of projects to improve this like Mergiraf. Someone looked at fixing the "sliders" problem 10 years ago but sadly it didn't seem to go anywhere, probably because there are too many core Git developers who have the same attitude as you.
> where Git's *default* merge algorithm gives you horrible diffs
You are saying it yourself.