So nimskull is planning on rewriting all previous commit messages to be more legible? Or is that unreasonable?

Assuming unreasonable, isn't it unreasonable to expect someone to completely break git history for everyone, and or invent time travel?

Seems to be an absurd amount of condemnation over a mistake that did far less than hurting no-one

That's not what he's saying at all. He's saying that the maintainer now has better commit messages, but there is still a need to go back and produce documentation for undocumented code with inscrutable commit messages. e.g. doing better now does not undo prior damage

ok, how?

ok, why can that method that you choose not be applied to nim?

On how: The "method" is to just respect the future contributors from the start, instead of waiting for ten years until someone tells you to write better messages.

Why can't it be applied: no idea, writing sensible commit messages seems like a basic necessity if your goal is sustainable project development, but that's just me

ah, the time machine method then

Well good luck hard-forking backwards into the past to re-write commit messages.