I dunno…leveraging retrospect is often useful.
By that school of thought, a repo should be recording what happened, not what you want to look like happened.
I haven't found it to be terribly useful though. IME, it adds noise for future code archeologists.
In very rare cases, having the messy long history can be slightly more useful for bisecting to find precisely where bugs were introduced, simply because it's more fine-grained.
I don’t think anyone needs to see the hundred incantations of `git commit -a -m fuckfuckfuck` I do before I make a PR.
To those who say “you should make meaningful commit messages” I say “yeah that’s what you see in the single commit when I make the PR”. If you say “you should just not commit until your local work is PR worthy”, I would say you’re not using git effectively.
By that logic you should leave typos in, because, you know, it's "more honest". Or you should not edit yourself in any way, because it's "more honest".
The reality is that not editing our communications, or our commit history, is a lack of respect to others, especially when that lack of editing imposes a higher cognitive burden on others (e.g., having to sift through more hay to find needles).
I didn't mean to imply any moral or dogmatic concept of "honesty" here. It only means there is less guessing about what events actually transpired.
But as you say, I agree it most often just adds noise, in my experiences.
But critically, that noise is a lack of respect towards others.
Mainly because it's more work. But it's work worth doing. It's also enjoyable.