I support anti-dox/and security practices by cleaning up repo history and rotating where you can, as long as your safe with the assumption that anyone with a copy of the history could push it back to central at any point.

But I really don't like the trend of some folks "need a clean history" and then disabled merge commits.

It's like they are saying "cool snap shot system you got there, id hate for it to be use to take a bunch of incremental snap shots with specific notes attached to each one. Why don't you let me bundle those all together real purdy like and no one has to know it took you 20 commits to fix that decade old bug."

I have literally never heard a reasonable claim that needing a "clean main branch" is more useful in a retro or bisect.

Maybe other folks know of a concrete example?