[speedyjay]

> offending commits will still also be available on GitHub (at least until the next garbage collection),

No. Forever. Literally forever. GitHub does not run garbage collection, like, ever.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4367977/how-to-remove-a-...

Dangling commit from 14 years ago :

https://github.com/nylen/connectbot/commit/1cd775d

There is only one way to delete data on github permanently and that's to request it from github support. Still, you would have better luck just deleting your repository and starting over from scratch, deleting your history locally and pushing from a pristine state.

[account42]

Which makes sense because just being orphaned within git doesn't mean that there aren't any external references from PRs or just comments that people expect to be able to view.

And of course for actual secrets (as in passwords/keys/etc.) having deleting them from GitHub is not going to help you anyway as others could have made local copies that you have no control over.

[leni536]

Hmm, do they count dangling commits towards your quota?