You can still bungle history with badly authored commits, though. This is exactly why I like Git - no need to think about how messy the history is while working on something, I can create lots of small commits tweaking things as I go, and then clean it all up into larger commits representing logical groups of changes, with proper description etc.
I'm fine with my commit flow and commenting, which perhaps helps. I do use orphaned dirty branches. It helps that fossil's tags are reusable, unlike git's.
For me, there've been cases where I've worked on an angle, only to discard it for another approach .. and much later wanting to revisit that angle because it was a good idea. If I discard history to "clean it up", such a resurrection becomes impossible.
