I gotta say, I was with you for most of this thread, but looking through old commits is definitely something that I do on a regular basis... Like not even just because of problems, but because that's part of how I figure out what's going on.

The whole reason I keep my git history clean and my commit messages thoughtful is so that future-me (or future-someone-else) will have an easier time walking through it later, because that happens all the time.

I'll still almost always choose merge instead of rebase, but not because I don't care about the git history-- quite the opposite, it's really important to me in a very practical way.