Someone was asking the other day what other readers use git history for over the long term.

We use it for differentiating Chesterton's Fence from cargo culting and arbitrary decisions.

You go back and find out from context that code was there to fix a bug or implement a requirement that no longer exists, you remove the code. You find out the person just liked to write code this way, you remove the code.

You find out that it was to solve a problem on FreeBSD or old Docker versions or for your biggest customer, you leave the code, or reimplement the fix.

Nobody will remember why they did something, but you can often figure it out from the shape of the commit and its siblings.