Discussion on pull requests is a better subject for ansible-devel usually.
All being said, I followed up with a question 3 days ago and it got flagged P3, and there are 160 of those in queue right now.
I had first requested some whitespace commits not go in, and this was fixed by a revert - which doesn't solve the history problem.
It appears there are now about 12 other commits in there, so the best thing to do would be to resubmit this as a squashed patch containing just the one commit.
Commits that take spaces in and add them back completely miss the point we had originally - which was about not breaking attribution on those lines in source control history, when there was no need to change those lines.