My ex-employer (Meraki) was VERY insistent on people cleaning up their histories. It was very good not just for keeping a clean tree, but also for code quality

My ex-employer (Meraki) was VERY insistent on people cleaning up their histories. It was very good not just for keeping a clean tree, but also for code quality - once you have code changes in neatly-separated commits with discrete chunks of functionality, any leftover test code or unrelated changes pop out immediately to both the original coder and the reviewer. By the way, this also helps with the issue this developer faced because part of the problem seems to have been that the backend and frontend changes were mixed in the same commits (hence the ugly hack for committing). Doing this kind of history-cleaning as you go makes it much easier to manipulate the order of committing changes to master.