Evangelical in that it’s documented as a theory & a paper for the concepts you can read about? Communicative properties are common in math–what’s novel is applying those properties to patches for source control compared to the older models.

I use git every day and I don’t recall patch ordering ever being a problem

Have you worked in a distributed team sharing just patches over email? If Alice pulls from Bob & then Catherine, but David reads & applies Catherine’s then Bob’s, Alice & David now have a conflict in the ordering when trying to push/pull later. I have ran into this. Or did you use a centralized, canonical (therefore not distributed) Git server with a pull request model? If you do the latter, you won’t run into the issue but you also aren’t using the distributed part of a distributed version control system (DVCS)–& most don’t since has too many issues with snapshot-based tools. This restricts the sorts of systems & team structures for source control we can even do (you need a Tvoralds dictator even for Linux’s mailing list) & we can’t really think outside the snapshot-limitations until we step outside of that snapshot bubble.