Is that the difference between forced pre commits vs opt in? I don't want to commit something that doesn't build. If nothing else it makes future bisects annoying.

But if I intend to squash and merge, then who cares about intermediate state.

The first step of which I usually have as pre-commit run --all-files (using the third-party tool of the same name as git feature) - so running locally automatically on changed files just gives me an early warning. It can be nice to run unit tests locally too, btw.