How often did you go back to the archived tagches that are older than say, 6 months ? Seems very niche, unless dunno, there are no version tags in the repo.
Sometimes I work on a feature, and it doesn’t quite work out for some reason or another. The branch will probably never get merged, but it’s still useful for reference later when I want to see what didn’t work when taking a second attempt.
Currently, those abandoned branches have been polluting my branch list. In the past I have cloned the repo a second time just to “archive” them. Tags seem like a better idea.
We also keep merged branches around. This has never happened, but if we needed to bisect at the merged-branch level, we could do that.
I know squash-merge isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I find it to be simpler and clearer for the 99+% case, and only slightly less convenient for the remainder.
Any branch older than 6 months is a strong candidate for deletion.
Now the work is visible in history, branch can be deleted, and anyone in the future can search the ticket number or whatever if your commit messages are useful.
Dunno if it's worth polluting history, just thinking out loud.
It just moves trash from branch list to tag list.