Much in the same way visiting a museum is much more useful for understanding the past than visiting your grandma's attic, I think a curated history is much more useful than an accurate history. When someone says a clean history, I think they're saying a well-curated history.
You don't submit your first draft almost anywhere else, why do you think nailed it the first time writing your commits? Sometimes you don't get things right, and rebasing is one of the tools that helps you make sure that the written record of your work is helpful.
Wow! I love this analogy! Allow me to disagree with you inside the premise of your own analogy. Visiting a museum is a much more useful way to understand past world history, but visiting your grandma's attic is a much more useful way to understand the little twists and quirks of your own family. In much the same way, I think a curated history is very nice for open source projects with lots of committers and constant newcomers, while a history that preserves foibles can be more useful for smaller and tighter teams. It is often very enlightening to see the missteps that were taken on the road to the eventual solution to a problem.
Well, that analogy is OK but there is another analogy which comes to mind: keeping track of everything you do may have very useful future side-effects. As any lab researcher will tell you, keeping a strict log of anything you do is the way to both knowledge and reproducibility.
So git history is not necessarily "human history" but "engineering history" and as such, may be much more important than you think and "curating" it may be a mistake.
You don't submit your first draft almost anywhere else, why do you think nailed it the first time writing your commits? Sometimes you don't get things right, and rebasing is one of the tools that helps you make sure that the written record of your work is helpful.