His experience from the 90s and early 2000s is meaningless in the current era. Version control and Google were in their infancy.
SVN was first released in 2000. Git in 2008. Branching, tagging and diffing were nowhere near what is possible now.
That goes back to desktop with a disk smaller than a GB, CPU in the tens of MHz with a network so slow and reliable, if you have one at all.