Comment by WorldMaker

Starting a new repo in SVN is find a server somewhere, if doesn't have SVN install SVN, if it does have SVN deal with whatever politics runs its trunk to find space/define a branch structure for you, and so forth.

It is its own footgun as well, but with git you can git init any directory you want and have a repo. Other than the learning curve of the not particularly well tuned CLI (and there are all sorts of graphical clients today and alternative CLI clients), it's very low barrier to entry to get something/anything in source control.

It's not just "larping as leet hackerz", there are real benefits to git over SVN. There are fewer barriers to entry for small teams and hobby devs, especially in a world with GitHub/GitLab/Sourcehut/and more, but also in the world where maybe a git repo never syncs with any other single machine or is hosted on the barest feature set SAMBA folder or is only ever using email-based PR flows.

git could be easier to teach. git could have a better out of the box CLI. That doesn't mean "git is overkill" especially from the point of view of "needing a whole central server setup just to store multiple versions of a file is overkill". Git is perhaps "underkill", it does the bare minimum as best it can in whatever environment you give it. It's intentionally dumb and stupid (hence its name, to be fair) and it's learning curve is as much because it is "too dumb" than because it "isn't intuitive". I've seen some "intuitive" UIs built on top of it. Another comment here remarked "git isn't a source control system, it's a low level toolkit for building your own" and that's not far from the truth and definitely not far from git's origins (and its name). That's a sort of "underkill". ("One day we'll finally build the right, intuitive high level API." That's basically how git was designed. You don't have to just take my word on that, you can search the old mailing lists for all sorts of interesting discussions and debates on "porcelain" options.)