Yep, the key to understanding git (why there's mutable history, etc.) is to understand that because of its history (designed by Linus) it's not designed to make

Yep, the key to understanding git (why there's mutable history, etc.) is to understand that because of its history (designed by Linus) it's not designed to make day-to-day developers's lives easier, but to serve foss project maintainers and release engineers. People who review code for inclusion in a project, want to track meta-progress on issues, want to pin versions for release, etc., mutable history means they can squash fixups or fix your whitespace for you, rebase changesets onto other changesets, have history that reflects the project management strategy, etc.