[Bartweiss]

As I understand "undo" it's a convenient feature for addressing quickly-discovered errors.

If you rapidly realize that you committed to the wrong branch, or left a line of code half-finished, or misspelled a word, there's very little value in logging that. If you had seen it two seconds before the commit you would have fixed it without a second thought, so why insist on preserving it seconds after the commit?

Presumably (if only for safety) no one is using 'undo' on anything pushed to a shared repo. I can appreciate the argument that we shouldn't rewrite history into a nice, streamlined narrative, but I don't see much reason to avoid tools like 'amend' for fixing commit messages, or 'revert' when some silly line of test code gets committed (and not pushed).

When I'm dealing with other people's Git histories, I appreciate the middle ground approach most. There's no point in spinning some imaginary, elegant story - if it's not real history then write up an essay instead of storing it in your 'history'. But I also don't need to see every line of "oops, un-stubbed X" - my experience is that at least for immediate fixes it only makes things harder to read.