Exactly... The SCM is a lot easier, and you avoid any middleware layers and indirection :)

Regarding all the previous size arguments: my system doesn't agree. A recent rsync sync gave me an 856 MB directory (of which 223 MB is those precious ChangeLog and ChangeLog-2015 files). A checkout from git, plus news, glsa, etc. (using hasufell's convenient portage-gentoo-git-config on GitHub) is only 782M, and I can get more detailed change information than those ChangeLog* files could ever give. Then there's the option of putting it on btrfs with compression if I still want the working tree smaller. You can argue about squashfs reducing the size, but you can do that with a tree from git just like you could with a tree from rsync, so it's irrelevant.