If you're relying on a serialized 'source of truth', against which everyone must independently ensure their changes sanely apply in isolation, the. you've already resigned yourself to a single-threaded process that's slower than what improved merges aim to enable.

Sure, that works – like having one (rare, expensive) savant engineer apply & review everything in a linear canonical order. But that's not as competitive & scalable as flows more tolerant of many independent coders/agents.

Should you be counting on confusion of an underpowered text-merge to catch such problems?

It'll fire on merge issues that aren't code problems under a smarter merge, while also missing all the things that merge OK but introduce deeper issues.

Post-merge syntax checks are better for that purpose.

And imminently: agent-based sanity-checks of preserved intent – operating on a logically-whole result file, without merge-tool cruft. Perhaps at higher intensity when line-overlaps – or even more-meaningful hints of cross-purposes – are present.