I can imagine these "relative text patches" could just commit as is written but could be committed with a corresponding metadata and referential locations array backed by some kind of encoding that lands in the same commit. That would unlock a visualization tool that could render a strikeout for the earlier precedent legal text or something like that in whatever way the modification applies.

> They wouldn't be necessary if version control would be used for laws.

So a country only needs to rewrite all the laws to adopt versioning, cool.

In reality both have can be used, commits to see what changed by whom and wordings that says what changed

Might work in some systems but England has Case Law stacked on top of statutes. That's tricky to turn back into code.