Yeah, it's definitely less powerful that what absorb is doing. I wasn't trying to argue that it was equivalent. I just wanted to share a bash one-liner that I've had success with in case others find it helpful.
> What if I want some parts of it into one commit and another parts into another?
Looks like absorb will automatically break out every hunk into a separate fixup commit. My one-liner will create 1 fixup commit for everything that's staged. That's typically what I need, but on the occasions it's not, I use `git add -p`, as kadoban mentioned, to stage exactly what I want for each commit.