> I've yet to find a situation in which I cared even a little bit about the prettiness of a git history. I am having trouble thinking of more than a couple situations, ever, where I cared about the contents of a git history, at all!

For me, it's the ability to use git blame and determine which commit was responsible for a line of code and read the commit message about why it was added.

If you don't keep a clean commit history, you end up with a commit message like "fixing some issues based on comments" which affects at least 30% of the lines of code in the file. If I'm looking at that file 6 months after the fact, that commit message gives me no information about why those lines were added/changed.

With a clean history, you can use the same command and see the exact reason why a line of code was added through the commit message that added/changed it.