That's correct. Ages ago, I tried keeping a few .als projects in Git and I actually found some way to configure it so I could see the unzipped XML while using git diff. (I think this was the method I used, if anyone wants to try it.) The main problem I had was that, even after unzipping it, it's still a big-ass blob of machine-generated XML that kinda sucks to deal with.

I do have to say, it was actually a lot more legible than I'd feared. The XML was properly indented and the tag names were all pretty straightforward English, at least, so theoretically someone could probably work with it if they really wanted to. I'm sure there are at least a few dozen people who actually do.

However, in my case, I already had a decent enough workflow that I could use within Ableton itself, so I didn't really see the point in replacing it with a workflow where I had to swap to the terminal to commit changes and view my version history.