> It would also be nice to have a repo that isn't language-agnostic. It's too easy to track non-semantic changes, like white space.

In my opinion this is a problem with programming languages rather than version control. Namely we mix presentation and representation when using text as our source code. In the case of whitespace we have an infinite number of syntactic presentations which all correspond to the same semantic representation. Tooling has been created to try to deal with this such as code formatters which canonicalize the syntactic presentation for other tools. Git itself even has to deal with this because of platform differences, i.e. LF and CRLF.