Deleting history is the equivalent of collapsing your modifier stack in Max. The only difference is Maya keeps track of every action instead of a collective group of actions; but after a certain amount of history nodes, going back to edit older ones is more or less worthless or undesired so there is no harm regularly…
I came from Softimage, Max is the closest thing to Softimage with regards to a modifier stack, although I've never used Max. I like many former Softimage users came from Lightwave > Softimage now my final journey because learning new software, especially 3D software in a pain, is, Maya. I have to live with it's problems…