To spell it out explicitly: I believe that modern version control systems, specifically ones that provide sophisticated branching facilities, reduce mental load on programmers and speed up tedious tasks. This could very well make people who take advantage of them better programmers (where "better" can be described in terms of efficiency). The less time I spend managing branches and doing merges/rebases the old way, the more time and effort I am able to devote to my primary task (actually programming).

I could manage patch files and tarballs with quilt, but I would be wasting my time and my productivity would drop. That would make me a "worse" programmer. If bad tools can hold me back, then better tools can improve me.