These conflicts are generally easy to reason about. The delimiter ours stands for "your team" whereas theirs could be seen as "the React Native team".
React Native comes with a global CLI (the react-native-cli package) which delegates commands to the local CLI embedded in the node_modules/react-native/local-cli directory.
As we mentioned above, the process has to be started from your current React Native version. If we had embedded the implementation in the local-cli, you wouldn't be able to enjoy this feature when using old versions of React Native. For example, you wouldn't be able to upgrade from 0.29.2 to 0.38.0 if this new upgrade code was only released in 0.38.0.
Upgrading based on Git is a big improvement in developer experience and it is important to make it available to everyone. By using a separate package react-native-git-upgrade installed globally you can use this new code today no matter what version of React Native your project is using.
One more reason is the recent Yeoman wipeout by Martin Konicek. We didn't want to get these Yeoman dependencies back into the react-native package to be able to evaluate the old template in order to create the patch.
The logic behind react-native-git-upgrade described above is going to power the standard react-native upgrade starting with React Native version 0.40.0.
This means that if you are upgrading from version 0.40.0 or higher, you will be able to simply run react-native upgrade in your project without having to install anything globally. The react-native-git-upgrade is provided so anyone can enjoy this improved experience today while using older versions of React Native.
As a conclusion, I would say, enjoy the feature and feel free to suggest improvements, report issues and especially send pull requests. Each environment is a bit different and each React Native project is different, and we need your feedback to make this work well for everyone.
I would like to thank the awesome companies Zenika and M6 Web without whom none of this would have been possible!