I think that the truth is probably somewhere in between.
I do like to squash and rebase before moving changes upstream. But, to me, that isn't really history quite yet. Or at least, it's not history that's worth recording. All those micro-commits from the work in progress are, in some ways, more akin to my editor's undo history. Which is also something I don't save.
It's also clear, in hindsight, that Mercurial's original position on this subject failed to anticipate AWS credentials accidentally being committed to source control.
But I have also seen (and done) some amount of history rewriting in long-lived branches that I don't think would have been necessary if Git had had some of Mercurial's ergonomics. Workflows for merging two different repositories while retaining the commit history from each, for example.
FWIW, Mercurial has had "censor" command for blowing away the contents of those revisions with AWS keys since 2015.
Although once stuff is pushed to the public repo you're probably going to want to change those keys regardless. And if it's on the local one, there's plenty of options for removing the commit.
I do like to squash and rebase before moving changes upstream. But, to me, that isn't really history quite yet. Or at least, it's not history that's worth recording. All those micro-commits from the work in progress are, in some ways, more akin to my editor's undo history. Which is also something I don't save.
It's also clear, in hindsight, that Mercurial's original position on this subject failed to anticipate AWS credentials accidentally being committed to source control.
But I have also seen (and done) some amount of history rewriting in long-lived branches that I don't think would have been necessary if Git had had some of Mercurial's ergonomics. Workflows for merging two different repositories while retaining the commit history from each, for example.