That would seem to suggest that you commit either after every keypress or at least before using the backspace or delete keys, right?

It feels to me that "what really happened" only really applies to "what did we release?" rather than "how did we get to what we released?". Completely agreed that every release should be tracked in version control without modifications, but I'm skeptical that auditors care that you forgot to run the linter before committing and then you did a follow-up commit to add a semicolon where one was missed, but all of that happened between releases.