Not as many as svn or cvs for sure. That's part of why it became popular. There was a job title "merge master" - literally there were people who's job was to handle merging in various feature branches. If you didn't have this person you risked days or even weeks of downtime because no one could use the central server without risk of making the situation worse. You would regularly open a file and find your work had been stomped on because one person added a small doc fix in their version of a file and merged it after your work went in, but the vcs didn't really merge, it just overwrote.

I'm not saying it can't be better - clearly it can.

Just pointing out that one person spending a little time unfucking a branch is massively superior to everyone not being able to work because that same person fucked up everyone's branches.