You are describing what Bazaar does by default. See https://duckrowing.com/2013/12/26/bzr-init-a-bazaar-tutorial/ for the comparison with git, hg, and bzr. And this for a little tutorial on the nested logs: https://bzrinit.com/02.html
This seems like a good goal for Pijul. I also prefer Bazaar’s way of naming revisions sequentially instead of a hash, but I get why it is the way it is now.