Rather than a weird "cult of personality", the fact that Git demonstrated with Linux that it could handle a relatively large amount of source code and allow dozens (hundred?) of programmer to work on it "asynchronously" were key factors for adoption, I believe. If SVN was that good, as it was already well-established online (Github was not the first online VCS frontend, far from it), it should have remained the king of the hill. But it was decapitated instead.
I am been using FOSS and commercial source management tooling since 1998, and the very fact that Linus only bothered with git due to BitKeeper changing their licence, proves that there was nothing special about it, other than personality and adoption wave.
Game development often uses commercial solutions like perforce that have central servers so you can lock out your binary files and everyone will know not to touch them at the same time as you.
I think I’ve seen SVN in a single studio in the past decade. It’s almost all Perforce, because of better performance and tooling and the Unreal integration.
And yes, locking unmergeable files is essential either way.
