If you make use of something like git-cliff style formatting for the first line of your commit messages it can actually make some decent automated release notes that can be broken down into features, bug fixes, documentation, chores, etc...

I've found this to be pretty useful for my projects, and users can quickly get a list of what they care about for changes (usually the features part). Since it's pretty automated, the amount of effort also means that even if barely anyone reads them, it's not a huge waste of time. It's actually kind of made me write better, more useful commit messages as I know that the first line of the commit will actually be presented to the user.