But why would you ever put that into your VCS as opposed to code comments?

The VCS history has to be actively pulled up and reading through it is a slog, and history becomes exceptionally difficult to retrace in certain kinds of refactoring.

In contrast, code comments are exactly what you need and no more, you can't accidentally miss them, and you don't have to do extra work to find them.

I have never understood the idea of relying on code history instead of code comments. It seems like it's all downsides, zero upsides.