Yeah, that was my instinct as well. The problem was that the first user did that kooky way of bringing the 18 files over with `git checkout`. That's a terrible idea, both because it lead to the catastrophe here, but also because you lose all history of those changes, they appear brand new in that commit (which makes `git bisect` and `git blame` much less useful).

No, just `git revert` that terrible commit, then do a regular sensible merge/rebase. Solves all problems in, like, two commands.