The commit is not orphaned, because the tag is still pointing to it, but it's indeed not reachable from a branch anymore. git does not update local tags when t

The commit is not orphaned, because the tag is still pointing to it, but it's indeed not reachable from a branch anymore. git does not update local tags when the tag has changed remotely (see "on retagging" in the git tag man-page), so it would have to be a different tag. Merging it back would be confusing, because you know have the old branch and the new branch in your history. It would cause the tag to be reachable again from master though.