Version Control (using say git) and Artifact Management (using Artifactory) are complementary. Version control is useful for easily browsing the historical changes and who made them. Artifact management tools can do this but its clunky. Also they dont offer a fine grained view of changes, as one version change might involve a large amount of changes.

When integrated with a workflow like feature branches, version control offers some real benefits around collaboration particularly for distributed teams.

Some places use just version control with no artifact management, i.e. Reddit. They deploy to 800 servers 200 times a week using just git. This may or may not be the best solution for you.

An artifact can be many things, not just a binary. It can be a tar ball of files, an rpm, a virtual machine or a docker container. But I've not really seen artifact tools used to deploy configuration managememt, you could just deploy straight from git or bundle it into a tarball or rpm.