I would argue that hg was more tasetful than git at the time github began. The one thing git had going for it was that the most common operations were absurdly fast from the beginning, while hg took a bit of time to catch up.
I agree with this take, I think hg could have overtaken git for a while, but git catered a bit better to the OS communities and hg catered a bit more to big companies from a DX perspective. Maybe in this case, the important thing is knowing that your partners/technologies are aligned with your vision of the future- git has been more open-source first (I would argue)
