[nomonnai]

I am afraid you're right. On the other hand, in my experience, writing an academic text is rarely straightforward, with a lot of forth-and-back involved. Ultimately, a human must decide whether the diffs look more like such a pattern or a script-generated one.

Edit. Btw, you can use Git with Word's docx-format out of the box. Docx is a zip folder with XML inside; git-diff will show text changes. Further, there's git-merge-driver for merging various file formats (https://github.com/Praqma/git-merge-driver).