[data_hope]

I think you can do that in a merge commit, sort of.

The more I think about it, the stranger a strong aversion to rewriting commit history for clarity is. In university if I did some math / physics calculation, I would often start, and once I got somewhere, make a clean copy of the successful work to have a concise and revised version.

[perfmode]

I am a firm believer that it's totally fine to rewrite history when working on a private branch that hasn't been pushed.

[jononor]

Mostly fine to do it on a feature/PR branch also, in my opinion. If those become long-lived with multiple people touching them (where history rewrites become peoblematic) you are not integrating continuously enough.

[cortesoft]

Not pushing private branches is risky though - you have no backup if something happens to your machine.