Version control systems and transactional databases are built over atomic operations. Transactions in particular refer to having multiple operations that either succeed or fail all at once, making in essence atomic operations composable (they normally aren't).

Editing a file and saving it multiple times is not an atomic operation, but reading a file can be, so having the user issue a reload command only after he's finished editing a file is an entirely reasonable approach that has been used in Linux since forever and it only shares some basic building blocks with version control or transactions, but there's nothing fancy about the approach. Fancy and very error-prone would be to apply configuration changes automatically, which is what the article seems to suggest.

In other words the joke is lame :-P