I use git-absorb a lot, it's been my daily driver since I discovered it. It is very conservative in what it does: if it doesn't know what to do, it does nothing

I use git-absorb a lot, it's been my daily driver since I discovered it. It is very conservative in what it does: if it doesn't know what to do, it does nothing. And in any case, each of the changes it introduces is a separate commit, so you can reorder or amend them however you like. Also, what a shameless plug I am, have a look at git-crecord to interactively commit files line by line.