Like all git operations that destroy history, it's a bit less scary than rm or unlink, because you can undo obvious fuckups using the reflog. Non-obvious fuckups will (by Murphy's law) only be detected long after the reflog has been GC'd, so it still risks losing work.

Git was written with Linux in mind, where curating a clean commit history is more important than the code itself and warrants the extra hassle.

An actually usable rebase would probably require something like a meta history. But then the meta history would accumulate fixup "commits" and typos in commit messages so the OCD people will want to change that and we're back to square one. In practice, the two times per decade it actually makes business sense to dig through the history to find when a bug was introduced instead of just writing the 5-line fix, you can live with a couple of imperfect commits and merges.