Yeah true! It still goes to clarifying what people mean by the words “history” and “rewrite”, etc. The primary public history of a feature branch might only be

Yeah true! It still goes to clarifying what people mean by the words “history” and “rewrite”, etc. The primary public history of a feature branch might only be preserved in the merge commit, so in some sense the preserved history is different than the branch history. It’s somewhat fair to call that rewritten. I prefer to focus on the fact the git never promised a “history” at all. Git doesn’t offer to capture what happened accurately, it only promised to keep the content of your changes and its relationship to the preceding state of the content. It only promised a sequence of dependent commits, and it allows reordering commits by design.