I would like to be able to self host this, and, while this is absolutely not the best way for you to monetize this thing, if you put it up for some sub 100 dollar price, and I felt like I was getting a lifetime pass... I would do it.
A lot of people, who are on their way to doing truly professional work, have this epiphany.
The place you need to get to is understanding that you are being asked to ensure a problem is solved.
You’re only causing a larger problem by “solving” issues without both becoming an SME and ensuring that knowledge can be held by the organization, at all levels that the problem affects (onboarding, staff, project management, security, finance, auditors, c-suite.)
I agree with everything you're saying, and I think other archaeologists feel the same.
My opinionated take is: I wouldn't want to use this space for the information that this tool could provide, and rather leave it as the truth.
The truth is that it was committed without a meaningful message, and now I might recognize a chain of message-less commits, representing a moment in time where the authors were trying to figure out where they wanted to end up.
If the tool is producing this info simply by reading the diffs in the code, why not just use it when you need it, to help explain what you're digging through, instead of changing the commit history?
Either way, the critical detail is: People should get that detail out before the rice has been cooked, and that's what I do for myself, in my own private repos, and when others do that for future archaeologists, we all benefit.
The value of the space is the ability to glean the commit author's thoughts, at the time they committed it.
This is extremely dissimilar to the thoughts of the author.
The value of what this emits is already handled by evaluating the diffs in the per-file history.
It's not good to throw this sort of thing over the fence, and justifying it by considering it to be wasteful of your precious time doesn't change that.
It's better to leave it blank, but a tool like this looks perfect to help someone avoid scrutiny, while simultaneously avoiding providing a tiny depiction of what they were thinking when they committed the change, at the expense of injecting vast amounts of noise.
I would like to be able to self host this, and, while this is absolutely not the best way for you to monetize this thing, if you put it up for some sub 100 dollar price, and I felt like I was getting a lifetime pass... I would do it.