> thus making the diffs sane

You can also use ReviewNB [1] that is literally built for Jupyter notebook diffs. You can see notebook visual diffs for any commit or pull request on GitHub. For pull requests, you can also write comments on a notebook cell (emulating the typical code review experience for Jupyter notebooks)

Disclaimer: I built ReviewNB for Jupyter notebook code reviews on GitHub.

[1] https://www.reviewnb.com/