I'm not sure how I feel about someone writing something and making me the author. I guess attribution makes sense in the form of paraphrasing. But I tend to think of commits as literal quotations.
I see what you mean, and it almost seems like the "sin" isn't the additional editing, it's the subsequent rebase. It's one thing to require contributors to rebase, but it seems like another to rebase for them. Maybe I'm missing something, but based on the "History Is Written By the Victors" section of TFA I would have been surprised to see anyone other than @ntalbott at the top of https://github.com/Shopify/active_merchant/graphs/contributo...
You may think of commits as literal quotations of the "Author", but it's important to realize that git doesn't. If you want to know who's ultimately responsible for a commit, you always want to look at the "Committer" since that's who actually signed on the dotted line so to speak.
I'm not concerned with who's ultimately responsible for the commit. I'm concerned with being called the author on something I didn't write. These distinctions are not made or enforced by git. At the end of the day, it's how humans interpret two pieces of metadata.
The first hit on Google and Bing for "git committer vs author" brings up this SO entry:
