99% of users won't use the feature
Which further proves that it's not likely to cause many hosting costs.
This is a good point -- I missed that.
invites users to review people's edit history
They already do this with comment history.
What do you mean by this? You can't see comment history currently.
If you don't want people digging in to your edit history, don't make controversial edits.
Hm, well, an edit is only controversial if you know that it was edited in a controversial manner. You wouldn't look in the edit history because you knew that it was controversial, you would look in the edit history and find that it was controversial. Unless, you meant to say "controversial posts" to which I would say that I disagree with that opinion.
People being jerks for calling out typo fixes likely will result in downvotes, thus discouraged by the community. Look at grammar police, they're frequently downvoted to the point where they're not very common (though more common than they should be).
This is a fair point.
I see it as a place to discuss news and politics, not a place to "socialize."
This is a rather one-sided/dubious statement. For one talking about news and politics could be deemed as socializing, plus a forum is just a medium of discourse in the general sense -- it doesn't really have any explicitly defined topic unless stated by an individual communtiy.
It wouldn't technically add content (unless you count the peristant old versions as added content), it provides passive improvement to quality.
What portion of that is text, and what portion of that is media?
Do note that, presumably, were this feature to be implemented, it would likely be able to be disabled on the side of the instance -- meaning that your instance wouldn't store any of the edits itself.