That back and forth is the most important part of the story! It shows that you thought through multiple approaches to the problem, (hopefully) why they didn't pan out, and they give someone else a starting point for returning to that approach in the future.
It isn't exactly rare that I go through the blame history on some project to find out why something was done in a way that seems stupid at first glance, just to get stuck on a giant squash commit saying "Implemented X".
"back and forth" is not the same thing as "all kinds of mistakes".
No-one cares about stray keystrokes other developers make, it's just noise.
Yes, we absolutely care about the design of the software we're working on, and that's what commit messages, self-documenting code, comments, issue trackers and project management (planning session etc.) are all for.
When you squash commits in Git the default generated commit message is even to merge together all your previous commit messages. Now is your chance to look at those old messages and change "Did X" to "Attempted X, but didn't work because Y".
When I'm investigating when and why some code was implemented the way it is; I don't want to look at a Git blame trying to find when something was changed, just to see that the most recent change was reverting some earlier messing around. Just to git blame again starting from just prior to said messing around, just to see the same thing again - noise is bad!
> No-one cares about stray keystrokes other developers make, it's just noise.
Sure, and `git commit --amend` is fine for those cases.
> When I'm investigating when and why some code was implemented the way it is; I don't want to look at a Git blame trying to find when something was changed, just to see that the most recent change was reverting some earlier messing around. Just to git blame again starting from just prior to said messing around, just to see the same thing again - noise is bad!
I guess that depends on your setup. My Emacs is set up so that `b` is "reblame from before this change". GitHub's blame UI has a similar button (though that, sadly, doesn't preserve in-file context).
At that point the cost of the "noise" is more or less zero.
It isn't exactly rare that I go through the blame history on some project to find out why something was done in a way that seems stupid at first glance, just to get stuck on a giant squash commit saying "Implemented X".