But one of the points of editing the history is to make sure that both of those are more likely to be yes -- it's to make the history easier to review historically than it would be unedited. (IMO, obviously).
And this is probably partly why there's what you originally called an "obsession" with rewriting history: retroactively rewriting something 5 months old is probably going to be a disaster. But rewriting 1 day's worth of commits to better express why a given change was made, to give a more accurate picture of the state of the rest of the code, and to make things in general easier for people to read in the future is pretty trivial. So why not do it?
