For me, rewriting history is a feature of Git, and not a bug. I used to use Mercurial, which prioritized immutability of history, and I found that I was too frightened of some of the more advanced features with not-obvious side effects to bother messing around with them, because if I messed up, there was often no easy way for me to revert my repository back to the way it was. Immutability of the central repository is a reasonable thing to want, but let me blow up my own local clone if I want to.

What's more, I find that phk's tone and the blog's tone are at odds with each other. The blog seems to have the attitude of "Git sucks and this is why", while phk's e-mail is far more interesting, instead arguing that Git fits into another class of software entirely and saying "It's not for us, but that's okay, and oh by the way we should probably accommodate those who prefer git".