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.