Comment by jurip

Yeah, agreed. I liked the idea of Mercurial branches better than git's — in principle I prefer more rather than less metadata in history — but they genuinely had a scaling problem. I can't recall the numbers, this being more than a decade ago, but I tested with a realistic number of branches for a team of developers using short-lived branches for a while and you could easily see Mercurial slowing down.

Back when I was testing bookmarks were available, but Bitbucket was pretty much the only forge that supported Mercurial and their tooling didn't support bookmarks, so that made them a non-starter for many users.