Was the conference recorded? I've tried searching, but I'm not turning anything up.
As an outsider you get my worthless full agreement on strictness of history, and on solving the monorepo or vendoring dilemmas. My employer at the time of the upheaval was a bitmover customer, and as we slowly switched away one repo at a time it definitely felt like a sideways step. I'd hesitate to say backwards because it did come with some big process improvements for us, but definitely not forwards.
I'd surely have been proud of solving problems with the quality that BK did too. I remember playing with a lot of the open source systems of the time¹, and none of them were in the same league. I'll make no apologies for this sounding like truly weird fan mail.
¹ I'm remembering hg, darcs, monotone, $some_implementation_of_arch, prcs, codeville but there was a lot of people in the space to some degree.