That's a strange statement given your background.

Since when does editing a file change the owner or leave an audit-trail behind, on stock linux?

If you're running auditd then that's a different story but I've never seen that used in production for this purpose because it's hard to get right and because there are so many simpler options much better suited to the task (version control, puppet, chef, etc.).

Auditing or not, in my experience you inevitably end up in permission-hell when multiple users mess with files that need to be readable by a common gid (sticky bits, umask, something is always off).

If you really found a way to make this work at scale, a detailed write-up would be interesting (to me).

In my experience that way lies unmitigated madness. I've had to clean up multiple such "sudo-style" deployments in the past.