> No one ever sees the history, honestly.

Then you wouldn't see value in rewriting. Unless you're not reading the history because it's a pain to read because it's messy.

I use `git blame` relatively frequently to understand the rationale and history behind the code I'm working on, or to track down bugs. Of course, this also requires writing decent commit messages---something that I encourage developers to do so that those maintaining their code in the future have some direction. Commit messages are a bit different than software documentation, not a substitute.

I bisect looking for bugs, where a clean history with small commits _that actually build_ is essential to quickly finding a bug. That can even be automated if you can create a script that can run a test suite or some other test to check for success.

This becomes increasingly important the more code and complexity you're dealing with. There are other cases where I look at history, but those are significant examples.