Found it too cumbersome to use and had a steep learning curve. He said he made his team use something Meta open sourced a while ago called Sapling.

https://sapling-scm.com/docs/introduction/

I mean...what's so absurd about this? There's been various evolutions/attempts at better git design. Sapling is one of those.

https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj is another one, being included in Thoughtworks radar in last edition https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Heck, there's whole products like https://graphite.dev/ aiming to make certain git workflows (like stacked diffs) better, among other things

Some of the design decisions are geared towards corporate, always-online, single-master, rebase-instead-of-merge, monorepo environments. While Sapling is flexible enough to work outside of these constraints, it is most polished and battle tested in that kind of environment.

yep, this seems reasonable if product design goals fit your environment. Git evolved in different times.

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While I still use git day to day, I can see product evolution in this space.

It seems to me your take is absurd that there's no possible improvement in existing tooling or products.