Again, github. If Mercurial had had something like github, it would have been closer. Github was git’s killer feature; git itself provided nothing except a bunch of kernel devs were using it - and I’m not convinced that alone would have propelled it to success. Kernel contributors don’t make up a large percent of all developers in the world.

Mercurial isn’t perfect. Being written in Python frequently makes it a pain, but it’s slowly converting to Rust.

I do wish darcs - also hindered by the language choice of the author - had done better. Theory-of-patches was incredible to work with, and practically eliminated merging being an issue. Pijul is going that route, but until they open source a server, it’s a non-starter for me.

All of my personal stuff is in hg repositories at Sourcehut. Mercurial is, thankfully, still popular enough that it’s got a reasonably large dev team and still has regular releases. As long as that holds, I’m good.