I've gone back and forth (and I probably spend more time thinking about tools at the expense of solving problems). I have a lot of git repos with either 1 commit or where I never even bothered committing. If you're programming you can just tar up the source folder and call it a day. 95% of the use case for VCS is committing to a single tree. Depending on what you're doing, it's rare you'll even look backward. If so, timestamps and usernames are often good enough (you wont even look at the code). It takes a lot of upfront work to be able to write a new unit test then run it on the source history to see when the regression was introduced (even though I think that's really cool).

The huge benefit of VCS is project management, which most people brush off as much as possible. Git and SVN provide models where responsibility is clear. For one person, it's a bit ridiculous to stage, commit, push, merge, build, test, release, but necessary when you get a few people involved or what to share the source code.

Artists are a different beast. First off, artists are often delivering art and never have to open the project again. It's like if programmers were hired for a couple hours to a couple weeks and only ever handed over binaries with no expectation to ever support or revisit it. For programming, a directory along with a series of files make up a project. For a lot of artist tools there's a monolithic binary project file. Generating "deliverables" are often done manually or configured inside the monolithic project file, where programmers would write a separate build script. Both with programmings and artists they mix project files, intermediate data, and deliverables all together. Programmers and scientists are the only ones with the motivation and technical skill to tease that apart and push for changes.