Looks like Mercurial can change the history just fine using the hg command. You just need to enable it first.
https://book.mercurial-scm.org/read/changing-history.html
Git can also be configured to disable history rewrites.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2085871/strategy-for-preventing-or-catching-git-history-rewrite
So the difference between git and hg really just comes down to the defaults.
I got weirdly invested in this, and by the end I was kinda happy that it was “just” a bug in the tooling and not anything actually malicious.
Most android keyboards just allow you to long-press on characters to type similar characters. So for example, on my Samsung keyboard, if I hold “O” for a second I get a popup with 15 o-like characters. You can do that with all characters that have similar characters. “ß” is under “s”, “ä” under “a”, and so on.
Just had a look. !wir_iel@feddit.org is a bit more than just leftist. It would be similar to calling Trump center right.
You haven’t missed anything.
That’s the same on Git.