no, apparently there was both. i was familiar with video cd which was mpeg-1 on a cd-rom (with some weird partitioning scheme). cd video is apparently a very obscure hybrid format with an analog video section and a digital audio section. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Video

yeah i remember learning this as a kid and being surprised. i originally thought laserdiscs were modern high tech, but then they turned out to actually be from the late 70s/early 80s with the primitive analog video encoding where red book audio cds of the mid to late 80s were actually digital.

in that case you probably flag a bunch of prs for release and it linearizes their order and rebases and tests each one a step ahead of your review (responding to any changes you make as you go).

you can parse the text at any time pretty much for free and use anything you learn to be smarter about manipulating the text. you can literally replace the default diff program with one that parses the source files to do a better job today.

what do you actually gain over enforced formatting?

first you should not be composing releases at the end from conflicting branches, you should be integrating branches and testing each one in sequence and then cutting releases. if there are changes to the base for a given branch, that means that branch has to be updated and re-tested. simple as that. storing changes as normalized trees rather than normalized text doesn't really buy you anything except for maybe slightly smarter automatic merge conflict resolution but even then it needs to be analyzed and tested.