To be fair, there are some good ones out there. I worked for a drug-rehab company in the 90s as the IT head that got mostly government funding for a 6 month-rehab-program for non-violent drug offenders (mostly stuff like heroine, cocaine, etc.). We also had an in-prison program but I don’t think that was as effective. Of course to get government contact money we would have to meet lots of strict guidelines too.
I definitely more wary of ones that don’t get any public funding and therefore have practically no guardrails and less forced transparency.
I think the idea is both are adding new files and also making changes to various files but his commits to the non-new files caused the conflict. Also, if both new files affect the same deliverable (like a DLL) then that could create a conflict in some cases (though I think that all depends on the build system).