Does anyone advocate rewriting shared history? Oddly I see this "exception" a lot in reply to this person but I'm not sure I ever read anywhere anyone saying rewriting shared history is a good idea.
I think its less people saying you should rebase shared history, and more people saying you should rebase without realizing shared history matters. Then some poor confused soul starts always rebasing before pushing/merging and they mess up their local history and do not know how to fix it.
A lot of git is "magic" to many developers, and the way that rebase works is certainly one of the features poorly understood.
Only in extreme circumstances where something sensitive (such as credentials) or otherwise (such as other people's copyrighted assets, or .svn directories in the case of some repos that were moved from SVN to get in a hamfisted manner) was checked into the repository and needs to be removed. Those are the only reasons for rewriting shared history.
My rule of thumb is that rewriting shared history is always, always bad. There may be situations where the proper precautions can mitigate the risk, but I've never seen a good example where it's actually a completely good idea without downsides.
