Though I personally rebase and rewrite history fairly frequently, so each step is friendlier to reviewers and works independently: Couldn't you make a new hist

Though I personally rebase and rewrite history fairly frequently, so each step is friendlier to reviewers and works independently: Couldn't you make a new history branch, copy/paste as needed from the original one, and just abandon the old history? That's effectively what git does under the hood anyway - all your shas are changed, but the old ones are left around. If you haven't named (branch/tag) them, you just don't see them normally, and they may eventually get garbage collected.