I've seen that, and even successfully fought against it once. I've also been on teams that don't treat it as a religious issue in the first place, and people rebase or merge from their private forks as they see fit.

Personally, I think that the only bar that is necessary is that commit history should remain readable - which is subjective, but that's why we have code reviews. In any case, this is not an issue with the tool, but rather with the religion that formed around it, which is often the case with software tooling.

One thing that helps a lot with a pragmatic consensus is to ensure that all members of the team have personal experience debugging old code that they didn't write or previously review.