I appreciate you using the word "fiction", but I think you have it backwards. The cleaned up post-facto linearization and "cleanup" is writing a fiction, telling a story about the changes rather than actually being the changes. This is great and I realize that that has its uses to build good stories about what our code is.

I'd like to think, however, and I think that this is my larger point in this thread, that maybe we could build better storytelling tools that don't delete/mangle/mutate the actual history so that we can see in the same repository both the story and the raw facts.