Another parallel idea to consider is procedure and policy.
The cleanup after the foot-shot was pretty gory, but I'm not sure with disciplined git-flow that its possible to replicate that foot-shot, and if you can't shoot yourself in the foot then the goriness of the cleanup is a non-issue.
A third level up is you've got two devs carefully not coordinating and working together on code that closely related to each other, aside from the git-splosion that is not generally a recipe for success. Like, refactor the obviously independent multiple concepts (obviously independent because non-cooperating devs are working separately in parallel on them) in those files into multiple files and then there aren't merges to fight.
The cleanup after the foot-shot was pretty gory, but I'm not sure with disciplined git-flow that its possible to replicate that foot-shot, and if you can't shoot yourself in the foot then the goriness of the cleanup is a non-issue.
A third level up is you've got two devs carefully not coordinating and working together on code that closely related to each other, aside from the git-splosion that is not generally a recipe for success. Like, refactor the obviously independent multiple concepts (obviously independent because non-cooperating devs are working separately in parallel on them) in those files into multiple files and then there aren't merges to fight.