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Well, git getting developed didn't really do much to move people off Subversion: at the time, multiple DVCSes were being developed, like Mercurial, Bazaar (derived from Arch) and Git...

What got people to switch to Git (arguably, worst UX among them, but fastest for most operations) was GitHub combined with the rising popularity of Linux. But mostly GitHub.

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I remember this differently. SVN had great _branching_ but horrific merge support. They resisted improvements to merging, because they wanted something theoretically perfect.

Git came along with great merge support and the entire world loved it.

Global ignores also came quite late for svn. Until then you needed to add a svn:ignore property to the root directory and then apply it recursively (which then could go wrong).

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