> You said "actual" as-if it was somehow inherently better because it's the "actual" history. But it isn't the "actual" history. So your communication on this point just becomes befuddled. Please be more precise.

actual: "Existing in reality and not potential, possible, simulated, or false: synonym: real." history: "A chronological record of events, as of the life or development of a people or institution, often including an explanation of or commentary on those events."

One of these things is a representation of the state of a codebase at a point in time. The other is a representation of a state of the codebase that never existed at any point in time.

> our positions are different by degrees than by categories

Absolutely not. I'm not sure how to interpret your comments as other than that you may not understand what rebase is actually doing.

A commit is a snapshot of a codebase at a point in time. If you commit when you've run your program, recording a point along the path of modifying the code where you've observed the codebase to be consistent, rebasing retroactively changes the snapshot of the codebase to something that you have never examined.

If foo.c defines a function foo that calls a function bar in bar.c, and you've updated the way that you call foo in foo.c and someone else updated the behavior of bar in bar.c, the act of rebasing in itself can change the output of your program without recording the step of making that change, and without you ever observing the program's behavior after that change (and before any other commits you've presumably made to get your code to its current state).

Are we at least on the same page that rebasing in itself makes changes to the atomic bits of recorded history, irrespective of what the size of those atoms are? You seem to be fixated on the size of steps being recorded, which is completely irrelevant to the point that rebase is retroactively changing the composition/snapshot of each step. The difference is between an immutable log of immutable events and a mutable log of mutable events. One of those is easier to reason about.