[xorcist]

> GitLab not having an easy way to say "i want this commit gone"

To be fair to GitLab, that would just be another way to say "force push".

Either you want the change gone from history, which makes it necessary to coordinate with everyone who has taken out a branch during that time (which is a force push) or you want the merge-and-backout to be visible in eternity (which is a revert commit). There's no way to have both, by definition.

The way to avoid screwups, in any version control system, is to have everyone actually read what they are about to persist to our shared history.

The by far most popular process to enforce that is code review. Any pull request which pulls in hundreds of unrelated commits hopefully won't get accepted. And if it does, there'll be plenty of time to evaluate why while coordinating the cleanup.