Advisor wants me to send manuscript to a potentially shady journal I have a paper that has never been submitted elsewhere. Now my advisor thinks that this Elsevier journal called Chaos, Solitons and Fractals (CSF) is a good fit. A cursory search shows that this journal has had a history of misconduct involving the chief editor. When I brought this up, my advisor told me that this happened over ten years ago and the journal seemed to be doing okay after the relaunch. He tells me that his peer had a good experience with them and peer review seemed to be at work.

Obviously, I don’t want to argue over things like this with my advisor. After all my paper might not even get published there. But I am also worried about ruining the credibility of my work given the reputation of this journal. Should I go with it? Is it okay to publish in a journal with such a history?
Why not? A quick look at the controversy indicates that the disagreements were entirely around the editor-in-chief publishing his own papers in the journal, papers which were lightly reviewed + indulged in a lot of self-citation. This means:


It's only the editor-in-chief's papers that are affected; none of the papers by other authors published in the journal are;
Once the editor-in-chief changed, it's no longer a problem.


So even if the editor-in-chief was in the wrong (which is not certain), it should be fine for you to publish there.

If it still concerns you, note that Clarivate Analytics / Web of science still has the journal indexed, i.e. they think the journal still meets their standards, and it has an impact factor of (as of time of writing) 3.064 which is good for the field.