Very nice MnT, such great colour! You’re right, the blue stragglers definitely pop more in the lower stretched version but the original is more impactful overall
Blue Stragglers are not quite though mergers however. They’ve also been called Vampire Stars as it happens when you have a fairly close binary star system. One of the stellar pair will exit the main sequence (MS) first as it will have a larger initial mass. As it moves off the MS it becomes a red giant and swells up to hundreds of times its size (think of our sun swallowing Mercury and Venus). If this material is within the gravitational well of its smaller binary star it’ll strip the newly closer hydrogen from the larger star.
As the smaller binary strips more and more hydrogen from its larger companion it becomes hotter and hotter. The once larger red giant now becomes smaller and cooler.
This process is also the process that causes repeating nova where the companion binary is a white dwarf.