Sad to see another Mercurial holdout switch to Git.

The latter is ahead in network effects in a massive way - but I always preferred Mercurial. I'd have used it more but - network effects! - used git because of the projects I was working on.

The main thing was that the mental model of Mercurial fit in my head and the CLI was predictable and regular, whilst the tool still scaled to large codebases.

I find Git wants me to think about its implementation details and internal terminology at unpredictable moments during use. It still gets the job done but it feels like doing random CAPTCHAs in the midst of my work.

I totally agree about Mercurial's superior ease of use and simpler mental model. However, it feels quite abandoned. I don't know what caused it though. It's a perfectly viable alternative to Git in my opinion.

Not abandoned. Both Facebook and Google internally use Mercurial as one of the version control systems. They will keep the Mercurial project alive.

See sibling comment linking to https://github.com/martinvonz/jj

I expect google to switch to that.