I’d add another reason to that: we’re using Git because BitKeeper wasn’t free (as in beer) at the time for general purpose use. Had it been, we’d all be using BitKeeper instead.

Probably not. The free (as in speech) part of git is what made it usable for entities like google, Microsoft, github etc. If git had been released with the same license model of BitKeepr it NEVER would have taken off.

perhaps they were referring to the fact the kernel used to run bitkeeper as VCS but the licensing prohibited development

It’s not very fast when you account for all the time and productivity wasted on getting “unstuck” all the time.

I devoted some time to RTFM and actually learning how things work so I can't say that I run into this issue

Once you get over the initial learning curve you will not get stuck very often