You know, syncing is the least I do with Git. In fact, for my personal projects, the syncing is entirely incidental--just a lazy way to publish and back up my files.

In addition to syncing, I use Git to keep track of my history, to maintain multiple versions in parallel, to work on different features at the same time without interfering with each other and probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. All this just for projects with one programmer--for work and group projects, I use even more complicated features.

So yes, if all you want is syncing, perhaps Git is contrived. But if you actually want version control, it's actually pretty simple.

I see what you mean but one could consider version control as a subproduct of syncing a working directory with a trunk. That do not need to mean syncing between different user's working directories.

We tried that - it was called Subversion. The industry's abandoning that way of doing things because the new way is simpler and better.