Instead of rebasing, etc....?

I often find myself pursuing a development branch that I'm pushing out
to a public repo, and then wanting to go back a few commits and start
the end of the branch anew.

o-o-o-o origin/dev
      \
       o-o-o dev

Of course then I want to push dev and move origin/dev to refer to it.
So I delete and recreate origin/dev.  That's essentially like
rebasing, and all the advice says "don't do it."  How bad is that,
really, if it's my own development branch?

If I try to avoid doing that I guess I have to "merge" with the remote
branch but discard all its changes?

o-o-o-o - - - -o origin/dev dev
       \      / 
        o-o-o 


Is there a shortcut for that?  It would be nice if Git had a way to
note that sort of "false parentage" (the dotted line above)
explicitly; it's not really there logically; it just helps the
workflows to move along smoothly.