Im always surprised by the amount of effort people put into trying to maintain a "clean" git history, and how much information they are willing to throw away to do that.

I kept wondering whether I was missing something.

I think maybe I had an epiphany just now, the last couple of sentences where the OP spoke about maintaining a clean project history suddenly made things click.

Personally, I don't want that, on the very occasional time I go into the git history what I am looking for is code history.....the story of how a piece of code arrived at its current implementation....that means I need all the commits, the "fixing a typo" commits, the "oops, overlooked a logic error" commits...

I don't want to see the history of the project when I look at git history, I want to see the history of the code.

Its messy, but it tells me so much. I can see how this piece of code arrived at its current state, who worked on it, and what they did.

The idea of git history as a way of tracking the project history just never occurred to me. Now I understand it, I definitely don't want it, but its nice to have a mystery cleared up.