>But that's what these tools are doing, in a large number of cases?

I mean No not really. I'm not sure why you think that.

>How much broken, unusable code exists within those 70k commits that ultimately would've had the same effect as if he had just pushed a `--allow-empty` commit thousands of times?

How much stable usable code exists within those 70k commits ?

This is pretty much exactly why I said the original question was not a great ask. You have your biases. Show an example and the default response for some almost like a stochastic parrot is, 'Must be slop!". How do you know ? Did you examine it? No, you didn't. That's just what you want to believe so it must be true. It makes for a very frustrating conversation.