... and gotta say. mercurial will let you do hard deletes. They just discourage it and try to offer tooling that allows you to do what you want without destroying history / changing hashes / generally complicating life for those using the repo.

They also do have the tools to completely rewrite history if you really really want to.

So, "principled fanatic" is not quite accurate I feel. They just have a lot more options than git (which also applies to their commandline tooling I feel, although of course there's a lot of 3rd party stuff out there for git to mimic much of what mercurial has out of the box these days).