Google docs handles conflicts by requiring an always-on connection, and showing each author a live view of the document. You can use overleaf, which provides a similar multi-author live editor for latex.
This might not be a nice way to write code, but in my experience it is a great way to write large multi-author text documents, and requires no teaching of new tools -- git is (in my experience) far too hard to teach non-coders, when you are just doing one project together. Even with a GUI, we still have to teach them about merging/conflicts.
Overleaf is certainly very convenient and so is Google docs, but I don't think they are meant to replace git, or v.v. Once you write your latex and your code, you can then commit it to git so you can benefit from git's version control. That is, unless it's acceptable for the text or code of a paper to live permanently on Overlaf or Google's servers - for me that's not acceptable at all. So I'll keep my local copies under version control and update them from Overleaf once in a while.
I understand that git appears foreboding and hostile to people who aren't trained as programmers. Again all I have to say is that I don't find it that hard and I expect a researcher in a scientific field to be able to cope with it.
This might not be a nice way to write code, but in my experience it is a great way to write large multi-author text documents, and requires no teaching of new tools -- git is (in my experience) far too hard to teach non-coders, when you are just doing one project together. Even with a GUI, we still have to teach them about merging/conflicts.