Cleaning up commits can also make it easier for reviewers to audit your changes. For example by breaking up a larger feature into steps that don't warrant their own pull request because they are too granular. Or by separating changes that I maybe did only to make things look more neat.
"Who decides where one level of granularity stops and the next begins? I think it’s the author of the commits. My workflow over the last ten years is based heavily on being able to massage commits so that I can prepare what I share to the server repository, where it can no longer be changed. I agree that there should be an unalterable history, but disagree with the author on where that history begins."
"My workflow is considerably different than it was before I used Git or had access to rebase. I would now be much less efficient if I didn’t have rebase. It would make me constantly focus on cleaning up commits before I really care to. You could make the argument that cleaning up afterward takes more time, but I haven’t experienced that to be the case. Instead, I want to be able to set the priorities rather than worry about committing something that I cannot undo."