Going solely off your description of the scenario; couldn’t you trivially model any history (H,H) node as two nodes —> (A, H’) —-> (H’, H) —> (H, B), and have it be deterministic again
I’m essentially thinking of H’ as a write-ahead-log prefixing any node
Yes, you can — that's effectively what "expanding" the chart looks like. With a parent of N children you need N target nodes (one per possible "last-active" child) with deep history the cardinality is the size of the subtree's leaf set, which is exponential in nesting depth. That's exactly the explosion flat FSMs hit when you compose them — and the reason Harel introduced H notation in the first place, to elide it. So determinism is recoverable, just at the cost of the very property state charts were designed to deliver.
I’m essentially thinking of H’ as a write-ahead-log prefixing any node