Another example is ghostty

The code base may go through several almost total rewrites before it stabilizes, especially for non-trivial systems that are performance sensitive. Changes to the code may be intrinsically non-modular depending on the type of software. This prior history can be enormous yet have no value, essentially pure noise.

The efficient alternative, which I’ve seen used a few times in these cases, is to retcon a high-quality fake history into the source tree after the design has stabilized. This has proven to be far more useful to other engineers than the true history in cases like this.

Incremental commits are nice but not all types of software development lends itself to that, especially early in the development process. I’ve seen multiple cases where trying to force tidy incremental commit histories early in the process produced significantly worse outcomes than they needed to be.

That doesn't have a commit history going back to what the parent said about the first 200 commits though. It starts off with basically 3 commits all called some variant of "initial public release", after which good commit messages start, so that probably skipped many intermediate WIP states

I agree that one can do good commit messages also early on though. Initial commit can be "project skeleton", then "argument parsing and start of docs", then maybe "implemented basic functionality: it now lists files when run", next "implemented -S flag to sort by size", etc. It's not as specific as "Forbid -H option in POSIX mode" and the commits are going to often be large and touch different components, but I'd say that's expected for young projects with few (concurrent) contributors