My biggest issue with that argument though is what constitutes "good" is subjective. For me a good commit history is one that faithfully chronicles what happen

My biggest issue with that argument though is what constitutes "good" is subjective. For me a good commit history is one that faithfully chronicles what happened. With this in mind, acceptable curation of the history for me is squashing or separating commits and neither of these require rebase. But I wouldn't object if a colleague chose to use rebase to accomplish this. I would, however, object to reordering commits or rebasing since this alters the chronicle. Which I guess leaves me with my opinion on rebase: You can, but you don't need to. If you are going to, be sure you understand what you are doing and don't alter the chronicle.